little heed to the things he told me. It was the first time I had
heard of this new speck among the countless specks of heaven, and
I did not care if I never heard of the thing again.

We were two youths much of an age together, Parload was two and
twenty, and eight months older than I. He was--I think his proper
definition was "engrossing clerk" to a little solicitor in Overcastle,
while I was third in the office staff of Rawdon's pot-bank in
Clayton. We had met first in the "Parliament" of the Young Men's
Christian Association of Swathinglea; we had found we attended
simultaneous classes in Overcastle, he in science and I in shorthand,
and had started a practice of walking home together, and so our
friendship came into being. (Swathinglea, Clayton, and Overcastle
were contiguous towns, I should mention, in the great industrial
area of the Midlands.) We had shared each other's secret of religious
doubt, we had confided to one another a common interest in Socialism,
he had come twice to supper at my mother's on a Sunday night, and
I was free of his apartment. He was then a tall, flaxen-haired,
gawky youth, with a disproportionate development of neck and wrist,
and capable of vast enthusiasm; he gave two evenings a week to
the evening classes of the organized science school in Overcastle,
physiography was his favorite "subject," and through this insidious
opening of his mind the wonder of outer space had come to take
possession of his soul. He had commandeered an old opera-glass
from his uncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had bought a
cheap paper planisphere and Whitaker's Almanac, and for a time day
and moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one satisfactory
reality in his life--star-gazing. It was the deeps that had seized
him, the immensities, and the mysterious possibilities that might
float unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor and the