THE WENDY HUT

Taranaki Daily News, 28 December 1929, Page 24 (Supplement)

THE WENDY HUT

SPEED ON EARTH—AND IN THE SKY. ‘Hi!” cried the Runaway Star—one of the fastest known stars in the sky. -Have you see all the fuss and commotion on that little planet called Earth?” "No,” replied Sirius, the brilliant and beautiful Dog Star. "What's happened now ” "Why, a man has flown 336 miles an hour in a thing called an aeroplane.” "Bravo!” laughed the Dog Star. "I wonder how they feel now they are beginning to crawl about like that?” "Crawl!” cried the Runaway Star. "That’s the joke! They call it speed! I do quite 138 miles a second, and nobody thinks anything of it.” "And just look at that flock of a few hundred stars, all twice as big as Earth, fleeting swiftly through space at terrific speed with never an accident,” mused Sirius, who was travelling at a great pace himself.

The flock of stars disappeared before the Runaway Star saw them, and it looked toward the Milky Way. Like a veil of light, the Milky Way spread across space; millions and millions of stars, all heaped together as if some giant had shovelled them up like sand and flung them into the air where they dashed along in a mad career, all in the order in which they had been thrown. 1

“You might begin to talk of speed when you think how fast the Milky Way is travelling,” said the Runaway Star. “But down on Earth I expect it looks quite still. If people want to know what speed is, I wish they’d calculate how many miles I've travelled while I’ve been talking to you! 138 miles a second—and how long have I been talking?”