The Lady was the first of our party who was invited to look through the equatorial.  Perhaps this world had proved so hard to her that she was pained to think that other worlds existed, to be homes of suffering and sorrow.  Perhaps she was thinking it would be a happy change when she should leave this dark planet for one of those brighter spheres.  She sighed, at any rate, but thanked the Young Astronomer for the beautiful sights he had shown her, and gave way to the next comer, who was That Boy, now in a state of irrepressible enthusiasm to see the Man in the Moon.  He was greatly disappointed at not making out a colossal human figure moving round among the shining summits and shadowy ravines of the “spotty globe.”

The Landlady came next and wished to see the moon also, in preference to any other object.  She was astonished at the revelations of the powerful telescope.  Was there any live creatures to be seen on the moon? she asked.  The Young Astronomer shook his head, smiling a little at the question.—­Was there any meet’n’-houses?  There was no evidence, he said, that the moon was inhabited.  As there did not seem to be either air or water on its surface, the inhabitants would have a rather hard time of it, and if they went to meeting the sermons would be apt to be rather dry.  If there were a building on it as big as York minster, as big as the Boston Coliseum, the great telescopes like Lord Rosse’s would make it out.  But it seemed to be a forlorn place; those who had studied it most agreed in considering it a “cold, crude, silent, and desolate” ruin of nature, without the possibility, if life were on it, of articulate speech, of music, even of sound.  Sometimes a greenish tint was seen upon its surface, which might have been taken for vegetation, but it was thought not improbably to be a reflection from the vast forests of South America.  The ancients had a fancy, some of them, that the face of the moon was a mirror in which the seas and shores of the earth were imaged.  Now we know the geography of the side toward us about as well as that of Asia, better than that of Africa.  The Astronomer showed them one of the common small photographs of the moon.  He assured them that he had received letters inquiring in all seriousness if these alleged lunar photographs were not really taken from a peeled orange.  People had got angry with him for laughing at them for asking such a question.  Then he gave them an account of the famous moon-hoax which came out, he believed, in 1835.  It was full of the most bare-faced absurdities, yet people swallowed it all, and even Arago is said to have treated it seriously as a thing that could not well be true, for Mr. Herschel would have certainly notified him of these marvellous discoveries.  The writer of it had not troubled himself to invent probabilities, but had borrowed his scenery from the Arabian Nights and his lunar inhabitants from Peter Wilkins.