Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 24.djvu/690

682 appears. And Polly was right in that first observation, when she said she got a good disk with that admirable glass of Mrs. Bowdoin.

The orbit was not on the meridian of No. 9, nor did it remain on any me- ridian. But it was very nearly South and North, an enormous motion in declination with a very slight retrograde motion in Right Ascension. At five thousand miles the Moon showed as large as a circle two miles and a third in diameter would have shown on old Thornbush, as we always called her older sister. We longed for an eclipse of Thornbush by B. M., but no such lucky chance is on the cards in any place accessible to us for many years. Of course, with a Moon so near us the terrestrial parallax is enormous.

Now, you know, dear reader, that the gigantic, reflector of Lord Rosse, and the exquisite fifteen-inch refractors of the modern observatories, eliminate from the chaotic rubbish-heap of the sur- face of old Thornbush much smaller ob- jects than such a circle as I have named. Jf you have read Mr. Locke's amusing Moon Hoax as often as I have, you have those details fresh in your memo- ry. As John Farrar taught us when all this began, and as I have said al- ready, if there were a State-House in Thornbush two hundred feet long, the first Herschel would have seen it. His magnifying power was 6450 ; that would have brought this deaf-and-dumb State House within some forty miles. Go up on Mt. Washington and see white sails eighty miles away, beyond Portland, with your naked eye, and you will find how well he would have seen that State- House with his reflector. Lord Rosse's statement is, that with his reflector he can see objects on old Thornbush two hundred and fifty- two feet long. If he can do that, he can see on our B. M. objects which are five feet long ; and, of course, we were beside ourselves to get control of some instrument which had some approach to such power. Haliburton was for at once building a reflector at No. 9 ; and per- haps he will do it yet, for Haliburton has been successful in his paper-mak- ing and lumbering. But I went to work more promptly.

I remembered, not an apothecary, but an observatory, which had been dormant, as we say of volcanoes, now for ten or a dozen years, no matter why ! The trustees had quarrelled with the director, or the funds had given out, or the director had been shot at the head of his division, one of those accidents had happened which will happen even in observatories which have fifteen-inch equatorials ; and so the equatorial here had been left as useless as a cannon whose metal has been strained or its reputation stained in an experiment. The observatory at Tamworth, dedicated with such enthu- siasm, "another light-house in the skies," had been, so long as I have said, worthless to the world. To Tam- worth therefore I travelled. In the neighborhood of the observatory I took lodgings. To the church where wor- shipped the family which lived in the observatory buildings I repaired ; after two Sundays I established acquaintance with John Donald, the head of this family. On the evening of the third, I made acquaintance with his wife in a visit to them. Before three Sundays more, he had recommended me to the surviving trustees as his successor as janitor to the buildings. He himself had accepted promotion, and gone, with his household, to keep a store for Haliburton in North Ovid. I sent for Polly and the children, to establish them in the janitor's rooms ; and, after writing to her, with trembling eye I waited for the Brick Moon to pass over the field of the fifteen-inch equatorial.

Night came. I was " sole alone ! " B. M. came, more than filled the field of vision, of course ; but for that I was ready. Heavens ! how changed. Red no longer, but green as a meadow in the spring. Still I could see black on the green the large twenty-foot circles which I remembered so well, which broke the concave of the dome ; and, on the upper edge were these palm-trees? They were. No, they