on with the other pleasures of the day: and finally, when bedtime comes, they plead for just another ten minutes because they know that going to bed means getting into the dark. They like to keep in the light as long as possible. Even if it is not merely a question of no Sun and full Sun (a question of night and day), when it is a question of much Sun and little Sun (summer and winter), you know very well which you prefer. When summer is coming the spring brings leaves to the trees, and little birds make their nests, and boys and girls begin to think of the summer holidays when they can go to the seaside. But when it comes near the winter—"the winter of our discontent," as Shakespeare puts it—then it is all cold; and many animals go into their winter quarters, perhaps to sleep. Human beings have by this time found many ways of alleviating the winter, especially by means of fires and lights, but we must remember that we owe even these to the Sun. Without the Sun in times gone by, those forests would not have grown which to-day give us our coal: the fires which we light in the winter are in many respects the work of the Sun. Hence it does not surprise us that in the old days they used to worship the Sun as a god. In our own country of Britain, the ancient Britons have left monuments, such as those at Stonehenge, showing the way in which the Sun came into their religion. There is one great stone standing erect at Stonehenge in a line with the sacrificial stone, so that the Sun at sunrise on one particular day in the year (June 21) just shines in a line over these two stones, and for a moment it
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THE SUN
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