THROUGH LIBRARY WINDOWS 271 



Polaris is one of our nearest neighbors 

 among the fixed stars and shines by the light 

 that left it fifty years ago. A railway train 

 speeding on at the rate of sixty miles an hour 

 would require six hundred million years to 

 reach it. Mizar, at the bend in the handle of 

 the Great Dipper, forty times as large as our 

 Sun, is one of the finest of double stars and 

 may easily be detected by a good opera glass. 



Groombridge, known as star "1830," called 

 the "race horse of the skies," is at present in 

 the constellation "Bootes" and is a star of the 

 seventh magnitude and of course invisible to the 

 naked eye. His speed is two hundred miles per 

 second! He has therefore a daily jog of seven- 

 teen millions of miles! Surely, some force of 

 which at present we know nothing, is propelling 

 this great Sun on at its unprecedented rate of 

 speed. He seems a messenger of the gods pass- 

 ing in hot haste through our vast system bear- 

 ing some important message into the infinities 

 beyond. He is the last star whose distance 

 from us has been accurately measured, and it 

 is 426 trillions of miles. Let us see how it looks 

 written out: 426,000,000,000,000! Interest- 

 ing and significant these ghostly figures ! 



Since we are dealing in figures and facts, that 

 represent the unthinkable and unknowable, we 



