“What are you doing, Mr. Sutherland?”

“I am trying to find the exact line that would go through my home,” said he.

“Is that funny little thing able to tell you?”

“Yes; this along with other things.  Isn’t it curious, Harry, to have in my pocket a little thing with a kind of spirit in it, that understands the spirit that is in the big world, and always points to its North Pole?”

“Explain it to me.”

“It is nearly as much a mystery to me as to you.”

“Where is the North Pole?”

“Look, the little thing points to it.”

“But I will turn it away.  Oh! it won’t go.  It goes back and back, do what I will.”

“Yes, it will, if you turn it away all day long.  Look, Harry, if you were to go straight on in this direction, you would come to a Laplander, harnessing his broad-horned reindeer to his sledge.  He’s at it now, I daresay.  If you were to go in this line exactly, you would go through the smoke and fire of a burning mountain in a land of ice.  If you were to go this way, straight on, you would find yourself in the middle of a forest with a lion glaring at your feet, for it is dark night there now, and so hot!  And over there, straight on, there is such a lovely sunset.  The top of a snowy mountain is all pink with light, though the sun is down —­ oh! such colours all about, like fairyland!  And there, there is a desert of sand, and a camel dying, and all his companions just disappearing on the horizon.  And there, there is an awful sea, without a boat to be seen on it, dark and dismal, with huge rocks all about it, and waste borders of sand —­ so dreadful!”

“How do you know all this, Mr. Sutherland?  You have never walked along those lines, I know, for you couldn’t.”

“Geography has taught me.”

“No, Mr. Sutherland!” said Harry, incredulously.

“Well, shall we travel along this line, just across that crown of trees on the hill?”

“Yes, do let us.”

“Then,” said Hugh, drawing a telescope from his pocket, “this hill is henceforth Geography Point, and all the world lies round about it.  Do you know we are in the very middle of the earth?”

“Are we, indeed?”

“Yes.  Don’t you know any point you like to choose on a ball is the middle of it?”

“Oh! yes —­ of course.”

“Very well.  What lies at the bottom of the hill down there?”

“Arnstead, to be sure.”

“And what beyond there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look through here.”

“Oh! that must be the village we rode to yesterday —­ I forget the name of it.”

Hugh told him the name; and then made him look with the telescope all along the receding line to the trees on the opposite hill.  Just as he caught them, a voice beside them said: 

“What are you about, Harry?”

Hugh felt a glow of pleasure as the voice fell on his ear.