yourself standing at a point from which you can survey the whole
system and see into the depths and details of it. At one point is
a single star (like our sun), billions of miles from its nearest
neighbour, wearing out its solitary life in a portentous
discharge of energy. Commonly the stars are in pairs, turning
round a common centre in periods that may occupy hundreds of days
or hundreds of years. Here and there they are gathered into
clusters, sometimes to the number of thousands in a cluster,
travelling together over the desert of space, or trailing in
lines like luminous caravans. All are rushing headlong at
inconceivable speeds. Few are known to be so sluggish as to run,
like our sun, at only 8000 miles an hour. One of the "fixed"
stars of the ancients, the mighty Arcturus, darts along at a rate
of more than 250 miles a second. As they rush, their surfaces
glowing at a temperature anywhere between 1000 and 20,000 degrees
C., they shake the environing space with electric waves from
every tiny particle of their body at a rate of from 400 billion
to 800 billion waves a second. And somewhere round the fringe of
one of the smaller suns there is a little globe, more than a
million times smaller than the solitary star it attends, lost in
the blaze of its light, on which human beings find a home during
a short and late chapter of its history.

Look at it again from another aspect. Every colour of the rainbow
is found in the stars. Emerald, azure, ruby, gold, lilac, topaz,
fawn--they shine with wonderful and mysterious beauty. But,
whether these more delicate shades be really in the stars or no,
three colours are certainly found in them. The stars sink from
bluish white to yellow, and on to deep red. The immortal fires of
the Greeks are dying. Piercing the depths with a dull red glow,