Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 24.djvu/459

1869.]  to put your bucket in the well than to turn on the Croton, if you wish to know what spring-water really is. If pedestrian travel could only be made fashionable, as it is in Europe, what a deal of prejudice and holiday-clothes parade might be spared us. Here in New England the mind of the masses is at the mercy of the artful demagogue, in spite of various ingenious ventilators made and provided, because in so many ways the masses are first persuaded what they ought to say and then taught to say it. I do not suppose that pedestrianism is a patent medicine for all local or district disorders; but I do say that if you want to know what a people is, you must travel among them, not be whisked through them. And if a young man wishes to lay in a good stock of health, a knowledge of his countrymen, and a fairer experience of men and things than he can get either in college or the counting-house, he had better take up knap-sack and staff, and explore either those valleys just named, the recesses of the White Hills, the little-known and glorious nooks of the Ramapo, the Berkshire glens, or the backwoods of Maine, instead of trusting himself merely to impressions picked up in hotel bar-rooms at Saratoga, Niagara, Newport, or Sharon Springs.

HAVE no sort of objection now to telling the whole story. The subscribers, of course, have a right to know what became of their money. The astronomers may as well know all about it, before they announce any more asteroids with an enormous movement in declination. And experimenters on the longitude may as well know, so that they may act advisedly in attempting another brick moon or in refusing to do so.

It all began more than thirty years ago, when we were in college; as most good things begin. We were studying in the book which has gray sides and a green back, and is called "Cambridge Astronomy" because it is translated from the French. We came across this business of the longitude, and, as we talked, in the gloom and glamour of the old south middle dining-hall, we had going the usual number of students' stories about rewards offered by the Board of Longitude for discoveries in that matter,—stories, all of which, so far as I know, are lies. Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough. But as to this business of the longitude, it was reserved for Q. to make the happy hit and to explain it to the rest of us.

I wonder if I can explain it to an unlearned world, which has not studied the book with gray sides and a green cambric back. Let us try.

You know then, dear world, that when you look at the North Star, it always appears to you at just the same height above the horizon or what is between you and the horizon: say the Dwight School-house, or the houses in Concord Street; or to me, just now, North College. You know also that, if you were to travel to the North Pole, the North Star would be just over your head. And, if you were to travel to the equator, it would be just on your horizon, if you could see it at all through the red, dusty, hazy mist in the north,—as you could not. If you were just half-way between pole and equator, on the line