“A Coat of Arms! What has he done to deserve a Coat of Arms?” asked Ruth.
“O! horrible things!—or his grandfathers have. One of them invented a war explosive for the British navy and another gave them a lot of powder to carry on the awful Crimean war! The Government made a Knight of him to pay him for his powder; and they are dreadfully proud of it. They’ve got it all written down on their Coat,” laughed Adelaide.
“They had better write down the number of human beings their fiendish inventions and gifts have killed,” said Ruth indignantly.
“O how glad I am to hear you say that. I told Mr. Bombs so in those very words,” exclaimed Adelaide with her eyes brim full of honest glow. “And mamma said I was too young to have an opinion about such matters,” she added in a grieved tone.
“I am only nineteen,” remarked Ruth, “but I have had an experience, and that amounts to more than years, sometimes.”
“Do you know Mr. Bombs is only twenty-one. It seems so strange that he should take it into his head to be a Pyrotechnist. But his mother died when he was young and I suspect his father was too busy making his millions to think about his training. He told me once that his nurse used to take him to the beach every evening almost, to see the fireworks. So you see he had them burned into him almost.”
“Probably the nurse had a fondness for that sort of barbarism,” replied Ruth. “O how wrong it is for parents to be so careless of their children! To trust them as they do, to the ignorant, the foolish and the wicked—they know not whom—often to anybody who is willing to wear a nurse’s cap and apron.”
“I’m sure that’s the way it was with Mr. Bombs. His head is full of fireworks. He went over to London on purpose to see King Pang and get hold of the secrets of the trade; but I think he found him rather foxy,” laughed Adelaide.
“Of course,” said Ruth. “The English Pyro-king does not relish having a rival in the American market.”