of it, all who have successfully done this may some time gather
and exchange greetings. Should this come about there will be a
few--Hipparchus and Ptolemy, Copernicus and Newton, Galileo and
Herschel--to be surrounded by admiring crowds. But these men will
have as warm a grasp and as kind a word for the humblest of their
followers, who has merely discovered a comet or catalogued a
nebula, as for the more brilliant of their brethren.

My friend wrote the letters S. J. after his name. This would
indicate that he had views and tastes which, in some points, were
very different from my own. But such differences mark no dividing
line in the brotherhood of astronomy. My testimony would count for
nothing were I called as witness for the prosecution in a case
against the order to which my friend belonged. The record would be
very short: Deponent saith that he has at various times known
sundry members of the said order; and that they were lovers of
sound learning, devoted to the discovery and propagation of
knowledge; and further deponent saith not.

If it be true that an undevout astronomer is mad, then was Father
Hell the sanest of men. In his diary we find entries like these:
"Benedicente Deo, I observed the Sun on the meridian to-day....
Deo quoque benedicente, I to-day got corresponding altitudes of
the Sun's upper limb." How he maintained the simplicity of his
faith in the true spirit of the modern investigator is shown by
his proceedings during a momentous voyage along the coast of
Norway, of which I shall presently speak. He and his party were
passengers on a Norwegian vessel. For twelve consecutive days they
had been driven about by adverse storms, threatened with shipwreck
on stony cliffs, and finally compelled to take refuge in a little