You can make sure of these surprising facts, my dears, with the aid of patience and a microscope.

DIZZY DISTANCES.

The other day, one of the school-children said to a chum, “The Little Schoolma’am told us this morning that some parts of the ocean are more than four miles deep!”

That’s easy to say, thought I, but try to think it, my dear!  Fix on a place four miles away from you, and then imagine every bit of that distance stretching down under you, instead of straight before you.  Perhaps in this way you may gain an idea of the depth of the ocean; but just consider the height of the air—­which, I’m told, is a sort of envelope about the earth—­more than nine times the depth of the ocean!  Yet, what a wee bit of a way toward the moon would those thirty-six miles take us!  And from the earth to the moon is only a very little step on the long way to the sun.

Oh dear!  Let’s stop and take a breath!  Why did I begin talking of such dizzy distances?

LAND THAT INCREASES IN HEIGHT.

Here is a letter in answer to the Little School-ma’am’s question which I passed over to you in April, and it raises such startling ideas, that, may be, you’d do well to look farther into the matter: 

DEAR JACK:  We suppose that the Little Schoolma’am and her writers on Greenland will concede its accidental discovery by Gunnbjorn, as narrated by Cyrus Martin, Jr., in his “Vikings in America” [ST. NICHOLAS, Vol.  III., page 586].  We have always thought Iceland appropriately named, and Greenland the reverse.

And now about that question of temperature.  If portions of Greenland are colder than formerly, may it not be because less heat comes through its crust from subterranean fires, as well as because the surface is constantly gaining in height, as some report?—­Very truly yours,

    NED AND WILL WHITFORD.

THE ANGERED GOOSE.

The picture of which you here have an engraving formed at first a kind of panel of a wall, and occupied a space beneath one of the cartoons of Raphael, the great Italian painter, whose grand picture of “The Transfiguration” is thought to be his chief work.  This panel-picture, also, was painted by Raphael, as some say, though others think it may be the work of one of his pupils.

[Illustration:  THE ANGERED GOOSE.]

A curious thing about the picture is this:  the goose is so excited, and scolding its tortoise so angrily for going slowly, that it has forgotten its own wings, when, if it would only use them, it could fly to its journey’s end long before the tortoise could crawl there.  Now, there are other two-legged geese who let themselves get angered and excited easily, and so lose many chances of serving others and helping themselves.  Perhaps you may know some of them.