Afterwards Mr. Farrow had his turn, and Mr. Armstrong then observed that they had had enough; that it was getting late, but that he hoped they would come again.  They started homewards, but their teacher remained solitary till far beyond midnight at his lonely post.  The hamlet lay asleep beneath him in profoundest peace.  His study had a strange fascination for him.  He never wrote anything about it; he never set himself up as a professional expert; he could not preach much about it; most of what he acquired was incommunicable at Marston-Cocking, or nearly so, and yet he was never weary.  It was for some inexplicable reason the food and the medicine which his mind needed.  It kept him in health, it pacified him, and contented him with his lot.

On the following evening Miriam and her husband sat at tea.

“You didn’t quite understand Mr. Armstrong, Miriam?”

“No, not quite.”

“Ah! it is not easy; it all lies in the axis not being perpendicular, and in our not being in the middle.  Now look here!”

He took a long string; tied one end to the curtain-rod over the window, and brought the other down to the floor.  He then took Miriam, placed her underneath it in the middle with her face to the window.

“Now, that is the north, and the top of the string is the pole star.  Just imagine the string the axis of a great globe in which the stars are fixed, and that it goes round from your right hand to your left.”  But to Miriam, although she had so strong an imagination, it was unimaginable.  It was odd that she could create Verona and Romeo with such intense reality, and yet that she could not perform such a simple feat as that of portraying to herself the revolution of an inclined sphere.

Mr. Farrow was not disappointed.

“It will be all right,” he said, and the next morning he was busy in the shed in the bottom of the garden.  He came to his afternoon meal with glee, and directly it was over, took his wife away to see what he had been doing.  The shed had two floors, with a trap-door in the middle.  To the topmost corner of the upper story he had fixed a pole which descended obliquely through a hole in the floor.  This was the axis, and the floor was the horizon.  He had also, by the help of some stoutish wire and some of his withies, fairly improvised a few meridians, so that when Miriam put her head through the trap-door, she seemed to be in the centre of a half globe.

“Now, my dear, it will all be plain.  I cannot make the thing turn, but you can fancy a star fixed down there in the east at the end of that withy, and if the withy were to go round, or if the star were to climb up it, it would just go so,” tracing its course with his finger, “and set there.  Now, those stars near the pole, you see, would never set, and that is why we see them all night long.”

It all came to her in an instant.

“Really, how clever you are!” she said.