"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

They climbed to a green height and reclined on the cool sward in the shade of a beech tree. Here they could pick out the winding of the quick little river between its green banks far below, and look across the roofs of slumbrous Newbern. The Wilbur twin could almost pick out the Penniman house. Then he looked up, and low in the sky he surprisingly beheld the moon, an orb of pale bronze dulled from its night shine. Never before had he seen the moon by day. He had supposed it was in the sky only at night. So his father lectured now on astronomy and the cosmos. It seemed that the moon was always there, or about there, a lonesome old thing, because there was no life on it. Dave spoke learnedly, for his Sunday paper had devoted a page to something of this sort.

"Everything is electricity or something," said Dave, "and it crackles and works on itself until it makes star dust, and it shakes this together till it makes lumps, and they float round, and pretty soon they're big lumps like the moon and like this little ball of star dust we're riding on—and there are millions of them out there all round and about, some a million times bigger than this little one, and they all whirl and whirl, the little ones whirling round the big ones and the big ones whirling round still bigger ones, dancing and swinging and going off to some place that no one knows anything about; and some are old and have lost their people; and some are too young to have any people yet; but millions like this one have people, and on some they are a million years older than we are, and know everything that it'll take us a million years to find out; but even they haven't begun to really know anything—compared with what they don't know. They'll have to go on forever finding out things about what it all means. Do you understand that, Bill?"

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

"Do you understand how people like us get on these whirling lumps?"

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

"How do they?"

"No, sir," said Wilbur.

"Well, it's simple enough. This star dust shakes together, and pretty soon some of it gets to be one chemical and some of it gets to be another, like water and salt and lime and phosphorus and stuff like that, and it gets together in little combinations and it makes little animals, so little you couldn't see them, and they get together and make bigger animals, 

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