We can now understand what happens as the buoyant carbon vapors soar upwards through the sun’s atmosphere.  They attain at last to an elevation where the fearful intensity of the solar heat has so far abated that, though nearly all other elements may still remain entirely gaseous, yet the exceptionally refractory carbon begins to return to the liquid state.  At the first stage in this return, the carbon vapor conducts itself just as does the ascending watery vapor from the earth when about to be transformed into a visible cloud.  Under the influence of a chill the carbon vapor collects into a myriad host of little beads of liquid.  Each of these drops of liquid carbon in the glorious solar clouds has a temperature and a corresponding radiance vastly exceeding that with which the filament glows in the incandescent electric lamp.  When we remember further that the entire surface of our luminary is coated with these clouds, every particle of which is thus intensely luminous, we need no longer wonder at that dazzling brilliance which, even across the awful gulf of ninety-three millions of miles, produces for us the indescribable glory of daylight.

Sir Robert Ball will contribute a series of articles on “The Marvels of the Universe.”  Six or eight of these articles may be expected during the coming year.

[Illustration:  THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY BUILDINGS, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.]

CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.

BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS,

AUTHOR OF “THE GATES AJAR,” “THE MADONNA OF THE TUBS,” ETC.

LIFE IN ANDOVER BEFORE THE WAR.

Andover is—­or Andover was—­like the lady to whom Steele gave immortality in the finest and most famous epigram ever offered to woman.

To have loved Andover; to have been born in Andover—­I am brought up short, in these notes, by the sudden recollection that I was not born in Andover.  It has always been so difficult to believe it, that I am liable any day to forget it; but the facts compel me to infer that I was born within a mile of the State House.  I must have become a citizen of Andover at the age of three, when my father resigned his Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric in Andover Seminary.  I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old—­to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee—­and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her father and demanded that he go build her a brick sidewalk to play upon.

What, I wonder, may be the earliest act of memory on record?  Mine is not at all unusual—­dating only to two and a half years; at which time I clearly remember being knocked down by my dog, in my father’s area in Boston, and being crowed over by a rooster of abnormal proportions who towered between me and the sky, a dragon in size and capabilities.