impossible for us to allude to the subject without a peculiar sense of
reverential self-suppression, at least for a week or so. Examination and
inquiry showed us no contiguous source of the message and it seemed most
improbable that it had come to us from any distant part of the earth, as
we had become acquainted with the difficulty or impossibility of
bridging our very great distances with the resources then at human
command, and with the unavoidable exigence of the earth's convexity.

* * * * *

It was a few months after this that my father, returning from a climb in
the neighboring hills, complained of great weariness and a sort of mild
vertigo. I had become exceedingly endeared to him. I found him a most
unusual companion, and unnaturally separated as I had been from more
ordinary associations, our lives had assumed an almost fraternal
tenderness.

I was greatly troubled to see my father's illness, and begged him to
take rest; indeed, to leave the observatory for a while; to visit Christ
Church. We had made some very congenial acquaintances in Christ Church.
A family of Tontines and a gentleman and his daughter by the name of
Dodan had often visited us, and while we had become somewhat a subject
of perennial curiosity, and were more or less visited by curiosity
hunters and others, actuated by more intelligent motives, the Tontines
and the Dodans remained our only very intimate friends.

Indeed, Miss Dodan had come to me, buried in scientific speculations and
denied hitherto all female acquaintances, like a beam of light through
a sky not at all dark, but gray and pensive and sometimes almost
irksome. Miss Katharine Dodan was gentle, pretty, and unaffectedly