They both laughed.

“Well, she shall be your guest for one year, but after that I shall insist on paying. Now let me thank you for parting with me so gracefully, and let’s go and get my Winifred and your Mary, and go and hear the wisdom of triumphant children.”

The chapel bell was beginning to ring, and the two men arose.

An hour or so later, after the orchestra and the smiling principal had properly introduced her, up sprang the valedictorian, Jean Winifred Rich, and thus spake Jean:

“Friends of the class of 1915, it is certainly ridiculous that two valedictorians should come from one family. In fact I guess it is a sort of joke that was played on us. Anyhow the real reason why I was chosen to say good-by was that I remembered a remark of my big brother. One evening last summer we were looking at a star which the Greeks called Phosphor in the morning and Hesperus in the evening, and I said that Venus was a poor name to teach the seniors, because they have all they can do to keep from falling in love, and that Venus is a planet, not a star.

“Horatio answered that the dictionary lets us call any heavenly body of light a star. Then he said that if we were on Venus, the earth would look exactly like Venus, a steady point of white lightning.

“I told this tale at class one day, and they elected me valedictorian right away, with instructions to tell you all that the class of 1915 knows about the earth. They thought that ten minutes would be enough.

“So every evening since then I have been obliged to think about the earth as a star, and sometimes the other members of the class came up to our house and helped me think. All this spring we have been doing it, and the way we did it was to pick up the earth and throw it out into the sky. There it would hang, and we could make it look as small as Venus or as big as the moon. When it was about as big as the moon we loved it very much.

“The first time all we could see was a great whirling thistledown. It must have been a cloudy evening on the earth, and there were lovely colors along the sunset line where the bright half met the dark half.

“Next evening the thistledown had changed into a soap-bubble half dark and half bright, but all of it as pretty as a rainbow. Little flecks of cloud kept rising from the equator, moving towards the poles, and then returning.

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