was, or lo-Phoebe ? We sent over for Annie, and she and Polly and George and I went to work again. We calcu- lated in the next week sixty-seven orbits on the supposition of so many different distances from our surface. I laid out on a paper, which we stuck up on the wall opposite, the formula, and then one woman and one man attacked each set of elements, each having the Logarithmic Tables, and, so in a week's working- time, the sixty-seven orbits were com- pleted. Sixty-seven possible places for Jo-Phoebe to be in on .the forthcoming Friday evening. Of these sixty-seven, forty-one were observable above our horizon that night.
She was not in one of the forty-one, nor near it.
But Despair, if Giotto be correct, is the chief of sins. So has he depicted her in the fresco of the Arena in Padua. No sin, that, of ours ! After searching all that Friday night, we slept all Satur- day (sleeping after sweeping). We all came to the Chapel, Sunday, kept awake there, and taught our Sunday classes special lessons on Perseverance. On Monday we began again, and that week we calculated sixty-seven more orbits. I am sure I do not know why we stopped at sixty-seven. All of these were on the supposition that the revolu- tion of the Brick Moon, or lo-Phoebe, was so fast that it would require either fifteen days to complete its orbit, or six- teen days, or seventeen days, and so on up to eighty-one days. And, with these orbits, on the next Friday we waited for the darkness. As we sat at tea, I asked if I should begin observing at the smallest or at the largest orbit. And there was a great clamor of diverse opinions. But little Bertha said, " Begin in the middle."
" And what is the middle ? " said George, chaffing the little girl.
But she was not to be dismayed. She had been in and out all the week, and knew that the first orbit was of fifteen days and the last of eighty-one ; and, with true Lincoln School precision, she said : " The mean of the smallest orbit and the largest orbit is forty-eight days."
"Amen !" said I, as we all laughed. " On forty-eight days we will begin."
Alice ran to the sheets, turned up that number and read : " R. A. 27 u'. South declination 34 49'."
" Convenient place," said George ; "good omen, Bertha, my darling! If we find her there, Alice and Bertha and Clara shall all have new dolls."
It was the first word of pleasantry that had been spoken about the horrid thing since Spoonwood Hill !
Night came at last. We trained the glass on the fated spot. I bade Polly take the eye-glass. She did so, shook her head uneasily, screwed the tube northward herself a moment, and then screamed, " It is there ! it is there, a clear disk, gibbous shape, and very sharp on the upper edge. Look ! look ! as big again as Jupiter ! "
Polly was right ! The Brick Moon was found !
Now we had found it, we never lost
it. Zitta and Gmelin, I suppose, had
had foggy nights and stormy weather
often. But we had some one at the
eye - glass all that night, and before
morning had very respectable elements,
good measurements of angular distance
when we got one, and another star in
the field of our lowest power. For we
could see her even with a good French
opera-glass I had, and with a night-
glass which I used to carry on the
South Atlantic Station. It certainly
was an extraordinary illustration of
Orcutt's engineering ability, that, flying
off as she did, without leave or license,
she should have gained so. nearly the
orbit of our original plan, nine thou-
sand miles from the earth's centre, five
thousand from the surface. He had al-
ways stuck to the hope of this, and on
his very last tests of the Flies he had
said they were almost up to it. But for
this accuracy of his, I can hardly sup-
pose we should have found her to this
hour, since she had failed, by what cause
I then did not know, to take her intend-
ed place on the meridian of No. 9. At
five thousand miles the Moon appeared
as large as the largest satellite of Jupiter
