THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX
A year from then it did!
It awoke the World with its challenging roar, silencing for ever, let us
hope, the racket of guns upon this dear planet, leading man in future to
seek his conquests in more transcendent ways, even outside Earth's
atmosphere, as it took its pioneer flight again from the misty top of
old Mount Greylock.
The World and his wife were there to see: scientists from the four
quarters of the globe--Earth's great ones.
And other spellbound spectators, too: Una, the White Birch Group, their
Boy Scout comrades--Stud fast developing into the type of hotspur who
wanted to take passage for the moon--all massed in such a stupendous Get
Together as made the mountain seem "moonshine land", indeed, to their
thrill-shod feet.
And never--oh! never since the history of Mother Earth and her satellite
began did such a spectacular traveler start on such a flaming trip as
when the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America threw the switch and the
steel explorer, twenty feet long, leaped from its platform high into the
air, pointed directly for the moon, with a great inventor's mathematical
precision,--trailing its two-hundred-foot, rosy trail of fire.
There was not breath--not breath, even, to cry: "Watch it tear!"
Only breath enough, in young girls' bodies, at least, to gaze off at
Mammy Moon, loved patron of many an outdoor revel, and ponder upon the
nature of the shock she would get when the Thunder Bird's last explosion
lit up her fair face with a blue powder-flash--lit it up for earth to
see!
"Do--do you think 'twill ev-er get there--two hundred and thirty
thousand miles, about, when--when an eighth of an inch out at the start;
and it would m-miss--miss?" breathed a youth who knelt by the heroine of
the evening, the inventor's daughter.
"Toandoah doesn't miss. My father doesn't miss." The young head of
Pemrose Lorry queened it in the darkness, with a pride which made of old
Greylock, at that moment, the world's throne. "But how--how are we to
live through the next hundred hours--the next four days--the time the
Thunder Bird will take to travel?"
Yet they did succeed in living through it and in leading time a merry
dance too, for young Treffrey Graham, junior, all old scores forgotten,
was proving a prince of chums, as spirited in play as he was prompt in a
pinch.
And together--hand clasped in hand, indeed--by virtue of her being the
inventor's daughter, he the son of the man who had resigned a fortune to
the transcendent invention, side by side with two or three of those Very
Great Ones, they stood, four nights later, looking through a monster
telescope upon a mountaintop, and saw--saw the celestial climax, the
first of the heavenly bodies reached.
Saw the blue powder-flash light up the full, round face of the Silver
Queen they loved, while the Thunder Bird, expiring, dropped its bones
upon her dead surface.
"It's--got--there," breathed the youth. "What next? Some day--some day,
maybe, we'll be shooting off there--together?"
"Yes! if only the Man in the Moon could shoot us back!" breathed
Pemrose.
Already it had come to be "we" bound up with "What next?" for it would,
indeed, be a zero "next" in which the hands of youth and maiden would
not meet in comradeship--and love.
But the sun and center of the girl's heart was still--and would be for
long--her father.
The greatest moment of that unprecedented night came when Toandoah bent
to her, and said:
"Little Pem! there was just one moment when I may have been discouraged,
you remember! None knew the Wise Woman who saved the city."
[Illustration]
* * * * *
A story of the best type of home life, with a charming heroine.
THEN CAME CAROLINE
By LELA HORN RICHARDS
With illustrations by M. L. Greer.
12mo. Cloth 306 pages.
Caroline was the fourth daughter in Doctor Ravenel's family of five
girls,--fourth on the list, but first in mischief, in ingenuity, in
originality, in human sympathy and democracy. The father's health made
it necessary for the Ravenels to leave their old Southern home and
migrate to Colorado. Here Caroline grew up--from ten to eighteen--her
days full of interest, her courage, as the family struggled along
under straightened circumstances, always unflagging. Sometimes the
delight and sometimes the despair of her mother and her sisters,
Caroline made friends in many quarters and met in unusual ways the
many emergencies into which her impulsiveness led her.
This is a splendid story of the best type of home life, and the
four other girls--Leigh the unselfish, Alison the ambitious and
self-seeking, Mayre the artistic and Hope the baby--complete a
well-individualized group, alternately caressed and disciplined by old
black "Mammy," who had accompanied her "fam'bly" from Virginia.
There are plenty of boys in the story too, likable lads, such as
inevitably would gather around a group of wholesome and merry girls,
ready for a game, a dance or any other frolic. Caroline will be a
favorite with girl readers. They will enjoy the account of her running
away; her attempt to help her mother form a "social acquaintance" in
their new home; her outwitting of Alison at the party; her early
literary efforts; and the daring with which she "puts her finger" in
nearly everyone's "pie."
LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Publishers
34 Beacon Street, Boston