We take our last look at the country from the open down above Sutton.  Blue hills beyond blue hills recede into the remote distance; from Banstead Down one can see into Oxfordshire.  Windsor Castle is in minute blue silhouette to the left, and to the right and nearer is the Crystal Palace.  And closer, clusters red-roofed Sutton and its tower, then Cheam, with its white spire, and further is Ewell, set in a variegated texture of autumn foliage.  Water gleams—­a silver thread—­at Ewell, and the sinking sun behind us catches a window here and there, and turns it into an eye of flame.  And so to Sutton station and home to Cockneydom once more.

FROM AN OBSERVATORY

It will be some time yet before the rising of the moon.  Looking down from the observatory one can see the pathways across the park dotted out in yellow lamps, each with a fringe of dim green; and further off, hot and bright, is the tracery of the illuminated streets, through which the people go to and fro.  Save for an occasional stirring, or a passing voice speaking out of the dimness beneath me, the night is very still.  Not a cloud is to be seen in the dark midwinter sky to hide one speck of its broad smears of star dust and its shining constellations.

As the moon rises, heaven will be flooded with blue light, and one after another the stars will be submerged and lost, until only a solitary shining pinnacle of brightness will here and there remain out of the whole host of them.  It is curious to think that, were the moon but a little brighter and truly the ruler of the night, rising to its empire with the setting of the sun, we should never dream of the great stellar universe in which our little solar system swims—­or know it only as a traveller’s tale, a strange thing to be seen at times in the Arctic Circle.  Nay, if the earth’s atmosphere were some few score miles higher, a night-long twilight would be drawn like an impenetrable veil across the stars.  By a mere accident of our existence we see their multitude ever and again, when the curtains of the daylight and moonlight, and of our own narrow pressing necessities, are for a little while drawn back.  Then, for an interval, we look, as if out of a window, into the great deep of heaven.  So far as physical science goes, there is nothing in the essential conditions of our existence to necessitate that we should have these transitory glimpses of infinite space.  We can imagine men just like ourselves without such an outlook.  But it happens that we have it.

If we had not this vision, if we had always so much light in the sky that we could not perceive the stars, our lives, so far as we can infer, would be very much as they are now; there would still be the same needs and desires, the same appliances for our safety and satisfaction; this little gaslit world below would scarcely miss the stars now, if they were blotted out for ever.  But our science would be different