_spirit_, without, in any universal way, exhibiting it.

"These are steps progressively represented, I may imagine, in the
planets. And, in the further progress outward, we reach the planet Mars.
Let us place here the period of spirit. On Mars is accomplished in
society, and accompanied by an accomplishment in its physical features,
also, of those ideals of living which the great and good unceasingly
labor to secure for us here and unceasingly fail to secure. O my child,
if we could learn somehow to get tidings from that distant sphere, if
only the viewless abyss of space between our world and Mars might be
bridged by the _noiseless and unseen waves of a magnetic current_."

We reached Christ Church in June, in 1883, and for one year were most
busy in completing the station we had selected, in receiving apparatus,
getting our observatory built and a useful, but not large telescope
mounted.

The position taken by us was attractive. It was upon a high hill, a
glacial mound which had been smoothed upon its upper surface into a long
and broad plain. The prospects from this position were exceedingly
beautiful. Christ Church was some ten miles distant and the irregular
shores northward outlined by ribbons of breaking waves lay upon the
seaward margin of our vision, while the broken intermediate landscape,
with interrupted agricultural domains and forests was in front of us and
far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant
charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through
the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed
and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely
interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive
elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood