"Did you ever have any experiences with lightning?" I asked Merrill, one day.
"Oh, a few," he said. "A thunderbolt struck the Trinity steeple the very day we finished our work. We had just taken down our tackle and staging after gilding the cross when—by the way, they say there's a hundred dollars in gold under that cross."
"Really?" I exclaimed. "How did it get there?"
"Somebody ordered it put there when the steeple was built. People often do queer things like that. I painted a flagpole on a barn up in Massachusetts where there was four hundred dollars in gold hidden under the weather-vane. Everybody knew it was there, because the farmer who put it there told everybody, and my partner was crazy to saw off the end of that pole some night and fool 'em, but of course I wouldn't have it."
Here was I quite off my thunderbolt trail, and although curious about that farmer, I came back to it resolutely.
"Well," resumed Merrill, "this lightning stroke came down the new rod all right until it reached the bell-deck, and there it circled round and round the steeple four or five times, wrapping my assistant in bluish-white flame. Then it took a long jump straight down Wall Street, smashed a flagpole to slivers, and vanished. Say, there are things about lightning I've never heard explained. I know of a steeple-climber, for instance, who was killed by lightning—it must have been lightning, although no one saw it strike. There were two of them working on a scaffolding when a thunder-storm came up, and this man's partner started for the ground, as climbers with any sense always do. But this fellow was lazy or out of sorts or something, and said he wouldn't go down, he'd stay on the steeple until the storm was over. And he did stay there, without getting any harm, so far as anybody on the ground could see, except a wetting. Just the same, when his partner went up again, he found him stretched out on the scaffolding, dead."
"Frightened to death?" I suggested.
AT THE TOP OF ST. PAUL'S, NEW YORK.