“What can I do then? Get my sister to live with us?”
“Why yes, I suppose so. There are evil tongues. We must have some one.”
His sister saw at once that she must play the rôle of huckleberry, and felt no great eagerness, but good-naturedly consented at last, firmly resolved to aid fate as much as possible so that she might go back to her own work.
The play began with taking them to the theatre twice a week when sister was careful that Jack should sit next to brother. It continued by taking them to the country for the summer. Then they came back to the city again and missed the long walks and the pleasant companionship of the afternoons with nothing to do but exchange ideas. Then Uncle was called to Chicago on business for a week. This lengthened to two weeks. On returning he was so glad to see her that he kissed her and she impulsively returned the kiss and fled. How could a lonesome bachelor long resist such a combination of youth, beauty and love. There was a quiet wedding soon in which two hearts as well as two hands were united. They are not lovers, they are chums. He knows her thoughts and she his—they like each other.
The Professor’s Story
When I was in college one of my professors was a rather old man who was fond of telling about his travels. He told me about several trips he had taken. Some of these stories were very interesting, for he had gone into many places outside the tourist’s ordinary routes in order to study subjects in which he was particularly interested. One of these trips was a visit to Rome. It was taken to attend a Congress of Chemists that assembled there in the Palace of Justice, or Palazzo de Giustitia as the Italians call it, located on the right bank of the Tiber near the Castel de St. Angelo. His daughter, a beautiful girl of 21, accompanied him on the trip. They traveled on the Red Star Line to Vlissingen, or Flushing, and up the Scheldt to Antwerp.
The Congress was held in term time and he was limited to an absence of six weeks. There were two things which he particularly wished to see during this time. One of them was the iron mines of Elba. The ores found in these mines are hematites and contain some of the finest crystals of hematite that have ever been discovered. Elba was also, you will remember, the home of Bonaparte after he had been expelled from France for the first time. Here he ruled in petty state from the fifth of May, 1814, to the twenty sixth of February, 1815.
The second, and indeed the chief, object of his trip was to see the boracic acid soffioni at Lardrello. Here, it had been stated, jets of steam break forth from the earth in which small amounts of boracic acid are contained. This steam is carried into water, the boracic acid condensed with the steam, and the dilute solution thus obtained evaporated at a low temperature so as not to again volatilize it. Ammonia and sulfureted hydrogen are also present and considerable amounts of ammonium sulfate come into commerce from this source. These statements which were so varied in character as to cause some suspicion of exaggeration had aroused his curiosity, only to be completely satisfied by first-hand information such as could be best obtained by a visit.