mental worries and fatigues, and only wanting a little change of their conditions to get back their bloom and cheerfulness.  I could not help being pleased to see how much of the child was left in her, after all the drudgery she had been through.  What is there that youth will not endure and triumph over?  Here she was; her story for the week was done in good season; she had got rid of her villain by a new and original catastrophe; she had received a sum of money for an extra string of verses,—­painfully small, it is true, but it would buy her a certain ribbon she wanted for the great excursion; and now her eyes sparkled so that I forgot how tired and hollow they sometimes looked when she had been sitting up half the night over her endless manuscript.

The morning of the day we had looked forward to—­promised as good an evening as we could wish.  The Capitalist, whose courteous and bland demeanor would never have suggested the thought that he was a robber and an enemy of his race, who was to be trampled underfoot by the beneficent regenerators of the social order as preliminary to the universal reign of peace on earth and good-will to men, astonished us all with a proposal to escort the three ladies and procure a carriage for their conveyance.  The Lady thanked him in a very cordial way, but said she thought nothing of the walk.  The Landlady looked disappointed at this answer.  For her part she was on her legs all day and should be glad enough to ride, if so be he was going to have a carriage at any rate.  It would be a sight pleasanter than to trudge afoot, but she would n’t have him go to the expense on her account.  Don’t mention it, madam,—­r—­said the Capitalist, in a generous glow of enthusiasm.  As for the Young Girl, she did not often get a chance for a drive, and liked the idea of it for its own sake, as children do, and she insisted that the Lady should go in the carriage with her.  So it was settled that the Capitalist should take the three ladies in a carriage, and the rest of us go on foot.

The evening behaved as it was bound to do on so momentous an occasion.  The Capitalist was dressed with almost suspicious nicety.  We pedestrians could not help waiting to see them off, and I thought he handed the ladies into the carriage with the air of a French marquis.

I walked with Dr. Benjamin and That Boy, and we had to keep the little imp on the trot a good deal of the way in order not to be too long behind the carriage party.  The Member of the Haouse walked with our two dummies,—­I beg their pardon, I mean the Register of Deeds and the Salesman.

The Man of Letters, hypothetically so called, walked by himself, smoking a short pipe which was very far from suggesting the spicy breezes that blow soft from Ceylon’s isle.

I suppose everybody who reads this paper has visited one or more observatories, and of course knows all about them.  But as it may hereafter be translated into some foreign tongue and circulated among barbarous, but rapidly improving people, people who have as yet no astronomers among them, it may be well to give a little notion of what kind of place an observatory is.