Stories of Starland

ANCIENT STORIES OF THE SUN.

"Sister, you have told me so many stories of the flowers. I wish you would tell me something about the sky. I have been looking at it for such a long time, watching the little white clouds floating across it like boats with silver sails; and then I tried to look at the bright yellow sun, but it dazzles my eyes. Won't you tell me about it, and where it goes in the evening when we cannot see it any more? Is it always ready in the morning to give us light? Is it ever late, do you think? What would we do if it forgot to come round the edge of the earth and give us light?" he continued anxiously.

"There is no fear of that," said his sister Mary, laughing at the idea. "But a long time ago people asked the very same question. In those days they thought the earth was flat, and surrounded by an ocean without end. The Hindoos supposed that the earth rested upon four elephants, and the four elephants stood on the back of an immense tortoise, which itself floated on the surface of an endless ocean. It was thought that the sun plunged into the ocean when it disappeared in the evening, and some people said they heard a hissing noise when the red-hot body went under the waves.

"But if the sun dropped into the water each evening, how did it happen that next morning it was seen again, as hot and bright as ever? The people could not tell why, so they said that during the night the gods made a new sun to be used the next day."

"That must have kept them busy," said Harry, laughing.

"The good people made up another story about the sun, so that the same one could be saved each night. Just as it was dropping into the ocean, a god named Vulcan, who had a great boat ready, caught it, and all night long he paddled with the blazing sun. Next morning he was ready at sunrise to send the sun up into the sky in the east. He threw it with so much force that it would go very high, and when it came down on the other side in the west, he stood ready to catch it again."

"But where does the sun really go to at night?" asked Harry curiously. "I should like to know."

HEAT OF THE SUN.

"We live on a big round globe called Earth," replied his sister, "and we travel round the sun, which gives the earth light and heat. The sun is like a great lamp in the sky, and when you face the lamp you see the light, but if you turn away from it you are in darkness. As the earth goes around the sun, it whirls around like a huge top; first one side and then the other is turned to the sun and gets sunlight, and so we have day and night. If the sun, or the lamp in the sky, went out and stopped shining, all the light would go out on the earth, and we would miss its heat as well.

"It is so hot that if it kept coming nearer and nearer until it was as far from the earth as the pretty bright moon, the earth would get warmer and warmer and melt like a ball of wax."

"Just like Nellie's doll, then," said Harry, "when she left it on the grass the other day. The sun was so hot that day that when Nellie picked up her doll, she found that its wax face had melted and the eyes had fallen in. So the sun did that," continued Harry, laughing heartily. "Poor Nellie! I must tell her that the next time I see her."

"I can show you something else to prove how hot the sun is," said Mary, as she picked up a leaf from the ground. "Just wait a moment while I go into the house and get a magnifying-glass."

In a few minutes she returned, holding the glass in one hand and the leaf in the other. She held it so that the sun shone directly upon the glass and passed through it onto the leaf. In a few seconds the leaf began to smoke, and then burn, until a little hole could be seen.

Harry was so surprised that he had to try it for himself, and he looked forward with much delight to a visit from his cousin Nellie.

"Won't I have a lot to tell her?" he said to his sister: "all about the sun's melting her dollie, and how to make the sun burn a hole through a leaf. But the sun cannot be very far away, can it?" he asked.

DISTANCE OF THE SUN.

"Yes, it is very far away," replied Mary. "If a railroad could be made from the earth to the sun, and a train started going at the rate of a mile a minute, it would take days and weeks and years to get there.

"Let me see," said Mary, making a little note in her note-book. "There are sixty minutes in an hour, and twenty-four hours in a day, and three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Why, Harry, do you know it would take that train nearly one hundred and seventy-five years to get there?"

"It must be very far away, then," said Harry, "more than a hundred miles."

"It is more than a million miles," said Mary. "It is nearly ninety-three millions of miles away. Now let us suppose you want to go to the sun. You would call at the railroad office and ask for a ticket to Sunland. The officer in charge would appear a little surprised, because that is quite a long trip. Then he would look up the cost of the journey in his book, and hand you a mileage book, saying: 'Sir, if you want to save money on this trip, you had better take a mileage book with you, costing two cents for every mile. Even then your fare will be nearly two million dollars.'"

"Then I would say: 'Dear sir, I cannot go, as I know my sister could not spare all that money. I think I would rather walk to the sun.' How long would it take me to walk there, supposing I could walk?" asked Harry thoughtfully.

"Dear, you would have to keep walking a very long time before you would ever get there. Supposing you walked four miles an hour, and ten hours a day, and kept this up for hundreds of years, you would be more than six thousand years on the way. When you reached the sun you would be footsore and weary, and as old as the hills."

Harry laughed heartily at the idea, and thought again of poor Nellie's doll and the melting wax running like tears down its cheeks.

"But suppose," he asked, his eyes bright with excitement, "someone fired a big cannon at the sun. Would the cannon-ball ever get there?"

Again Mary brought out her little note-book, and, with rather a look of surprise, she said: "Supposing the cannon-ball went as fast as it could go, it would take nine years to reach the sun, and the sound of the explosion would reach there in fourteen years. The cannon-ball would come along first, and five years afterward, if you were living on the sun, you would hear the sound made when the cannon was fired off.

"It takes time for me to walk from the garden to the house, so it takes time for sound to travel from the earth to the sky; and sound travels only one-fifth of a mile in a second. Do you remember the thunderstorm the other day, Harry, that frightened you so?"

"I shall never forget it," said Harry, trembling at the thought. "You said, 'Count slowly'; and I counted one, two, three, four, five, up to fifteen."

"Then I said: 'Don't be afraid, brother; the storm is three miles away.'"

"Yes, I remember," said Harry; "and I thought you were very clever, and wondered how you knew."

"It was not so wonderful, after all, was it?" said Mary, laughing.

"Now tell me, sister," said Harry. "Supposing I had a very long arm, and stretched it out toward the sun, and touched it with the tip of my little finger. What would happen?"

"You would never know that you had burned it, for the pain of burning would be one hundred and fifty years going along your little finger, and down your giant arm nearly ninety-three millions of miles long, before it at last reached your brain. Then it would let you know that one hundred and fifty years before you had burned your little finger."

Harry stretched out his little arm in the direction of the sun, and, looking at it critically, laughed at the idea of a giant arm millions of miles long.

"It is too short by several inches," said his sister, reading his thoughts, and joining in the laugh. "It would take hundreds and hundreds of little arms as long as yours, would it not? Now what else do you want to know about the sun?"

SIZE OF THE SUN.

"If you are not very tired, sister," said Harry coaxingly, "I should like to know how large it is. Is it as large as the earth?"

"Ever so much larger," replied Mary. "It is so large that if it were cut up into a million parts, each part would be larger than the earth. If we could weigh the sun in a pair of giant scales, it would take over three hundred thousand globes as heavy as the earth to make the scales even. If the sun were hollowed out, and the earth placed in the center, there would be room for the moon as well. Now the moon is thousands of miles from the earth, and yet the edge of the sun would be thousands of miles from the moon, as you will see in the picture. If a tunnel could be made through the center of the sun, and a train started going at the rate of a mile a minute, it would take six hundred days for the train to reach the other side of the tunnel. If this same train went around the edge of the sun it would take five years. A train going around the earth would take seventeen days to complete the journey."

"But suppose we went around the sun in a big steamer, like the one Uncle Robert came over in; how long would that take?" asked Harry curiously.

"Only fifteen years," said his sister, laughing. "If you had started when you were a little baby you would still have five more years to travel before you would get back again to the starting-point."

"Then the sun must be very large," said Harry thoughtfully. "Let us call it GIANT SUN. Has it always been as large as it is now?"