"under these sardonic constellations."

"Do! Please!"

"Shall I, really?"

They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the
white smiling moon.

"Well," he began, "as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against
future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred 'Now I
lay me's.'"

"Throw down a cigarette," murmured some one.

A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian
command:

"Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks
reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of
such skies."

Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice
resumed:

"I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes
until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I
believed that because a man cried out 'My God!' when a safe fell on him,
it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went
to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to