You notice the change in her tone? The letter gave me the strongest impression of a new, warm, almost anxious interest on her part. My fancies, as first at Wampsocket, began to play all sorts of singular pranks: sometimes she was rich and of an old family, sometimes moderately poor and obscure, but always the same calm, reposeful face and clear gray eyes. I ceased looking for her in society, quite sure that I should not find her, and nursed a wild expectation of suddenly meeting her, face to face, in the most unlikely places and under startling circumstances. How ever, the end of it all was patience, patience for six months.

There's not much more to tell; but this last letter is hard for me to read. It came punctually, to a day. I knew it would, and at the last I began to dread the time, as if a heavy note were falling due, and I had no funds to meet it. My head was in a whirl when I broke the seal. The fact in it stared at me blankly, at once, but it was a long time before the words and sentences became intelligible.

"The stipulated time has come, and our hidden romance is at an end. Had I taken this resolution a year ago, it would have saved me many vain hopes, and you, perhaps, a little uncertainty. Forgive me, first, if you can, and then hear the explanation!

"You wished for a personal interview: you have had, not one, but many. We have met, in society, talked face to face, discussed the weather, the opera, toilettes, Queechy, Aurora Floyd, Long Branch and Newport, and exchanged a weary amount of fashionable gossip; and you never guessed that I was governed by any deeper interest! I have purposely uttered ridiculous platitudes, and you were as smilingly courteous as if you enjoyed them: I have let fall remarks whose hollowness and selfishness could not have escaped you, and have waited in vain for a word of sharp, honest, manly reproof. Your manner to me was unexceptionable, as it was to all other women: but there lies the

source of my disappointment, of—yes, - of my sorrow!

"You appreciate, I cannot doubt, the qualities in woman which men value in one another, culture, independence of thought, a high and earnest apprehension of life; but you know not how to seek them. It is not true that a mature and unperverted woman is flattered by receiving only the general obsequiousness which most men give to the whole sex.

In the man who contradicts

and strives with her, she discovers a truer interest, a nobler respect. The empty-headed, spindle-shanked youths who dance admirably, understand something of billiards, much less of horses, and still less of navigation, soon grow inexpressibly wearisome to us; but the men who adopt their social courtesy, never seeking to arouse, uplift, instruct us, are a bitter disappointment.

"What would have been the end, had you really found me? Certainly a sincere, satisfying friendship. No mysterious magnetic force has drawn you to me or held you near me, nor has my experiment inspired me with an interest which cannot be given up without a personal pang. I am grieved, for the sake of all men and all women. Yet, understand me! I mean no slightest reproach. I esteem and honor you for what you are. Farewell!"

There! Nothing could be kinder in tone, nothing more humiliating in substance. I was sore and offended for a few days; but I soon began to see, and ever more and more clearly, that she was wholly right. I was sure, also, that any further attempt to correspond with her would be vain. It all comes of taking society just as we find it, and supposing that conventional courtesy is the only safe ground on which men and women can meet.

The fact is there's no use in hiding it from myself (and I see, by your face, that the letter cuts into your own conscience) — she is a free, courageous, independent character, and— I am not.

But who was she?

Bayard Taylor.

MANY poets, and some more practical people, have striven to express the intensity of their longing to divine the conditions prevailing upon the other planets which journey with us around the sun. Doubtless many have sought this knowledge with a deep desire to find there the solution of some of the insoluble riddles our world is always making; but the most have only wanted a momentary sensation, such as the common mind gets from mere novelty. If science could give them the eye of omniscience, they would come back to the dear commonplaces of the world only to become more determinedly narrowed by its uses. The intensity of the intellectual gravitation which, happily enough, keeps the minds of most men, as it does their bodies, well down to the grubbing work of life, can only be measured by those who have watched the relations of astronomical science, especially in its new phases, to the popular mind. As long as the curious eye of the speculator could only look into the shallow mysteries of the firmament built by man, there were always more students of astronomy than any other branch of science. But since discovery and invention have opened an infinite universe before us, since those flickering points of light have become each the centre of a world system rather than some accident in a man-made heaven, we have rather lost interest in the stars. There is probably a good reason for a part of this to be found in the enhanced value which our earth has had given it by modern science. Affection for the stars was once a polite way of showing a contempt for the earth; but the same science which has lifted the heavens until their depths dizzy us, has also made our earth a respectable object of consideration: man has found, in the long-shunned but in evitable question whether he came from the worm through the monkey, enough to try his brains, and his stomach too,

for years to come. Until he has got rid of this enormous question of his own origin and destiny, until his eager eyes have explored the just seen abyss of time up which he has been climbing for a hundred millions of years, we can hardly expect him to look up to the stars. Nebulæ and star-drift in due time; but blood is thicker than ether, and one's ancestors nearer than the nearest stars.

Following up his ancestral line from step to step, over the slippery and sometimes distant stepping-stones by which we reach the past of our earth, man finally arrives at a time when the record is lost or illegible. Then there arise questions concerning the early state of our earth which cannot be answered from the evidence which it alone affords. Our only chance to obtain information on these matters is to look to the other worlds, and get from them what we can in the way of facts to illustrate that part of our earth's history which is not recorded in the "great stone book." The evolution of our earth can in this way be traced in time, very much as we trace the evolution of an animal, not from itself alone, but by the stages shown in its kindred. For the present we must content ourselves with the appliances of investigation, as yet imperfect, and limit our efforts to the bodies which share with us the government of our sun. Of these, the moon alone is in that close relation to the earth which makes it possible to push our inquiries into details. There, at least, our knowledge goes very far. Few of those who have only seen the moon with the naked eye have an idea of the extent and accuracy of the information which has been gained concerning its physical character. It is not too much to say that we know the general topography of this side of the moon much better than we know that of any of the great land masses of the earth except Eu