“Then hooray! let’s get to work. I want to see the moon with the new plane mirror.”
“Moon, bah! You’re lunatic enough as it is, boy.”
Tom gave his uncle a comical look, and then shyly held out his hand, which was gripped in a clasp which made him wince.
Chapter Forty Seven.
There was a heavy post one morning at breakfast, and as Mrs Fidler glanced at the letters, she screwed up her face and turned her eyes upon Tom, to shake her head as much as to say, “What work, what work!”
For to write a letter was a terrible effort to Mrs Fidler. She could write a beautifully clear hand, as the names of the contents of her jampots bore witness, but, as she confided to Tom, it was “such a job to find the next word to set down.”
One of the letters was so big and legal-looking in its broad blue envelope, whose ragged edges told that it was lined with linen, that it took Tom’s eye at once; but Uncle Richard merely slit it open, peered inside, and laid it beside his plate till the meal was at an end.
“I’m going up into the laboratory, Tom,” he said then, and left the room.