swallow her up. She never dreamed that all her royal beauty should pass behind a pall, that all her glory should be demeaned by pitiless eclipse, and her dome of delight become the valley of humiliation! Is there no help? I said. Can no hand lead her gently another way? Can no voice warn her of the black shadow that lies in ambuscade? None. Just as the young girl leaves her tender home, and goes fearless to her future,—to the future which brings sadness for her smiling, and patience for her hope, and pain for her bloom, and the cold requital of kindness, or the unrequital of coldness for her warmth of love, so goes the moon, unconscious and serene, to meet her fate. But at least I will watch with her. Trundle up to the window here, old lounge! you are almost as good as a grandmother. Steady there! broken-legged table. You have gone limping ever since I knew you; don't fail me tonight. Shine softly, Kerosena, next of kin to the sun, true monarch of mundane lights! calmly superior to the flickering of all the fluids, and the ghastliness of all the gases, though it must be confessed you don't hold out half as long as you used when first your yellow banner was unfurled. Shine softly tonight, and light my happy feet through the Walden woods, along the Walden shores, where a philosopher sits in solitary state. He shall keep me awake by the Walden shore till the moon and the shadow meet. How tranquil sits the philosopher, how grandly rings the man! Here, in his homespun house, the squirrels click under his feet, the woodchucks devour his beans, and the loon laughs on the lake. Here rich men come, and cannot hide their lankness and their poverty. Here poor men come, and their gold shines through their rags. Hither comes the poet, and the house is too narrow for their thoughts, and the rough walls ring with lusty laughter. O happy Walden wood and woodland lake, did you thrill through all your luminous aisles and all your listening shores for the man that wandered there?

Is it begun? Not yet. The kitchen clock has but just struck eleven, and my watch lacks ten minutes of that. What if the astronomers made a mistake in their calculations, and the almanacs are wrong, and the eclipse shall not come off? Would it be strange? Would it not be stranger if it were not so? How can a being, standing on one little ball, spinning forever around and around among millions of other balls larger and smaller, breathlessly the same endless waltz,—how can he trace out their paths, and foretell their conjunctions? How can a puny creature fastened down to one world, able to lift himself but a few paltry feet above, to dig but a few paltry feet below its surface, utterly unable to divine what shall happen to himself in the next moment,—how can he thrust out his hand into inconceivable space, and anticipate the silent future? How can his feeble eye detect the quiver of a world? How can his slender strength weigh the mountains in scales, and the bills in a balance? And yet it is. Wonderful is the Power that framed all these spheres, and sent them on their great errands; but more wonderful still the Power that gave to finite mind its power, to stand on one little point, and sweep the whole circle of the skies. Almost as marvelous is it that man, being man, can divine the universe, as that God, being God, could devise it. Cycles of years go by. Suns and moons and stars tread their mysterious rounds, but steady eyes are following them into the awful distances, steady hands are marking their eternal courses. Their multiplied motions shall yet be resolved into harmony, and so the music of the spheres shall chime with the angels' song, "Glory to God in the highest!"

Is it begun? Not yet.

No wonder that eclipses were a terror to men before Science came queening it through the universe, compelling all these fearful sights and great signs into her triumphal train, and commanding us to be no longer afraid of our own shadow. The sure and steadfast Moon, shuddering from the fullness of her splendor into wild and ghostly darkness, might well wake strange apprehensions. She is reeling in convulsive agony. She is sickening and swooning in the death-struggle. The principalities and powers of darkness, the eternal foes of men, are working their baleful spell with success to cast the sweet Moon from her path, and force her to work woe and disaster upon the earth. Some fell monster, roaming through the heavens, seeking whom he may devour,—some dragon, "monstrous, horrible, and waste," whom no Redcrosse Knight shall pierce with his trenchand blade, is swallowing with giant gulps the writhing victim. Blow shrill and loud your bugle blasts! Beat with fierce clangor your brazen cymbals! Push up wild shrieks and groans, and horrid cries,

"That all the woods may answer, and your echoes ring,"

and the foul fiend perchance be scared away by deafening din.

O, sad for those who lived before the ghouls were disinherited; for whom the woods and waters, and the deep places, were peopled with mighty, mysterious foes; who saw evil spirits in the earth forces, and turned her gold into consuming fire. For us, later born, Science has dived into the caverns, and scaled the heights, and fathomed the depths, forcing from coy yet willing Nature the solution of her own problems, and showing us everywhere, GOD. We are not children of fate, trembling at the frown of fairies and witches and gnomes, but the children of our Father. If we ascend up into heaven, he is there. If we take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall his hand lead, and his right hand hold.

Is it begun? Not—well, I don't know, though. Something seems to be happening up in the northwest corner. Certainly, a bit of that round disk has been shaved off. I will wait five minutes. Yes, the battle is begun. The shadow advances. The moon yields. But there are watchers in the heaven as well as in the earth. There is sympathy in the skies. Up floats an argosy of compassionate clouds, and fling their fleecy veil around the pallid moon, and bear her softly on their snowy bosoms. But she moves on, impelled. She sweeps beyond the sad clouds. Deeper and deeper into the darkness. Closer and closer the Shadow clutches her in his inexorable arms. Wan and weird becomes her face, wrathful and wild the astonished winds; and for all her science and her faith, the Earth trembles in the night, and a hush of awe quivers through the angry, agitated air. On, still on, till the fair and smiling moon is but a dull and tawny orb, with no beauty to be desired; on, still on, till even that cold, coppery light wanes into sullen darkness. Whether it is a cloud kindly hiding the humbled queen, or whether the queen is indeed merged in the abyss of the Shadow, I cannot tell, and it is dismal waiting to see. The wildness is gone with the moon, and there is nothing left but a dark night. I wonder how long before she will reappear? Are the people in the moon staring through an eclipse of the Sun? I should like to see her come out again, and clothe herself in splendor. I think I will go back to Walden. Ah! even my philosopher, aping Homer, nods. It shimmers a little, on the lake, among the mountains—of the moon.

I declare! I believe I have been asleep. What of it? It is just as well. I have no doubt the moon will come out again all right,—which is more than I shall do if I go on in this way. I feel already as if the top of my head was coming off. Once I was very unhappy, and I sat up all night to make the most of it. It was many hundred years ago, when I was younger than I am now, and did not know that misery was not a thing to be caressed and cosseted and coddled, but a thing to be taken, neck and heels, and turned out doors. So I sat up to revel in the ecstasy of woe. I went along swimmingly into the little hours, but by two o'clock there was a great sameness about it, and I grew desperately sleepy. I was not going to give it up, however, so I shocked myself into a torpid animation with a cold bath, it being mid-winter, and betwixt