"Sister, I wish you would tell me a story about the sun," said Harry. "Where does it go at night, and where does it come from in the morning?"

"We live on a big round globe called the earth," replied his sister, "and we travel around the sun once every year. The sun is like a great lamp in the sky. When we face the lamp, we see the light, and when we turn away from it, we are in darkness.

"As the earth travels around the sun, it whirls like a huge top. When the side of the earth on which we live is turned toward the sun, we have day. But when the earth turns around so that the sun can not shine on us, we have night.

"If the sun stopped shining, there would be no daylight, and soon there would be no heat on the earth.

"The sun is very, very hot. If it should come nearer and nearer to the earth, every plant and animal in the world would die. The rivers and the seas would dry up, and at last the great earth would melt like a ball of wax."

"How far away is the sun?" asked Harry.

"It is so far away that it would take more than a hundred years to travel the distance by the fastest railroad train."

"Is it more than a thousand miles?"

"Yes, it is more than a million miles."

"Suppose there were a road all the way to the sun. How long would it take me to walk there?"

"Let me see," said sister Mary, taking out her notebook. "If you should walk four miles an hour and ten hours a day, you would be more than six thousand years old before you could finish your journey."

"But suppose," asked Harry, his eyes bright with wonder, "some one fired a big cannon at the sun. How long would it take the cannon ball to get there?"

Mary looked in her notebook again. "If a cannon ball could be shot to the sun, it would take nine years to reach it. Now what else do you want to know about the sun, little brother?"

"I should like to know how large it is. Does any one know? Is it as large as the earth?"

"Very much larger," replied Mary. "It is so large that if it were cut up into a million parts, each one of the parts would be larger than the earth.

"If a train should run at the rate of a mile a minute, it would take five years for it to go around the sun. A train going at the same rate could travel the distance around the earth in less than three weeks."

"Then the sun must be very large," said Harry. "It is larger than anything I ever heard about. Let us call it Giant Sun."

"There are stars far away in the sky that are larger than the sun," said his sister. "And there are planets like our earth which are near the sun. But I will tell you about them some other day. Now do not forget what I have told you about Giant Sun."

"Forget! How could I, sister? It is better than any fairy tale I have ever heard. Why, you have told me enough about Giant Sun to keep me thinking all day."

From "Stories of Starland." Copyright, 1898.
By permission of the publishers, Silver, Burdett & Co.