I think you must have guessed that I mean the moon,--the beautiful moon. Now, I want you to make another guess: Is the moon bright because it is made of fire, like the sun; or because the sun shines on it, as it does on Venus and Jupiter?
If any of you think it is made of fire, you must try to warm your little toes and fingers in the moonlight, as you do in the sunshine, and you will find out for yourselves that it is not a great fire, like the sun, and that you cannot get warm in the light of it.
And now you will guess at once, that, if it is not fire itself, it must shine from the sun's fire; and that is right. The moon itself is cold and dark. It is the light of the sun that makes it look bright to us. We might call it the sun's looking-glass, in which we see his image or reflection.
But we cannot at all times see the whole of it. When we do, we call it a full moon, and, when we see only the edge of it, we say it is a new moon. The moon itself does not change its shape. It is always round, like an orange--a dark round ball, which we should never see at all, if the sun did not light it up for us; and it is only a part of the time we can see the side which is lighted up.
Which do you suppose is the larger,--the moon, or the stars? Now I know you will say the moon, because it looks so much larger; but you must remember that the stars are so far away, we can hardly see them at all, and the moon is our own moon, and much nearer to us than our own sun.
We can see more of it than we can see of the stars; but it is a very small thing indeed, compared with one of them. It would take about fifty moons to make one such earth as we live on, and it would take more earths than you can count to make one star or sun.
I MUST tell you of something that happened one day last summer, when I was at the Zoölogical Garden in Philadelphia.
Among the persons standing around the cage where the monkeys were kept, was an old lady who had on a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. All at once, a big brown monkey stretched out his paw between the bars, snatched the spectacles, and scampered away, chattering and grinning with delight.
Of course, the poor lady was in distress. The keeper came to the rescue, and, by driving the monkey about the cage with a long pole, forced him at last to drop the spectacles. But one of the glasses had come out of it; and this the thief still held in his mouth, and refused to give up.