Jimmy stretched out the old piece of pipestem, and the feathers leaped up to it as though they were alive.
“Well, I’ll be blowed!” shouted Jimmy, trying the experiment time and again, and each time having the fluff leap up to cling to the stem. “What is it? What makes it act all alive?”
“Electricity.” Lee Renaud picked up the broken stem. “This thing is amber. I just happened to find it in a junk pile. An old book told me about how people found out long ago that 'delectable amber, rubbed with woolen’ would generate enough electricity to draw to itself light objects.”
“I’ll be blowed! Well, I’ll be blowed!” Jimmy Bobb kept saying to himself, as he tried the amber and feather stunt over and over. “Just think, I can rub up this here lightning-power myself!”
Lee Renaud was not through with his show pieces yet. From the cupboard he brought out the strangest little contraption of all. Upon the center of a stout plank about two feet long, he had erected two small posts of wood. The tiny figure of a man, ingeniously cut out of cornstalk pith, sat in a swing of frail silken thread that hung suspended from the tops of the posts. At one end of the board was an insulated standard of brass. At the other end was a brass standard, uninsulated. Lee carefully arranged this curious apparatus so that the insulated stand was connected with the “prime conductor” of the old glass friction-wheel. Against the other standard was laid a little chain so that the chain end touched the floor, thus making what is known electrically as ground contact.
Now the fun began. Electrified by its connection with the prime conductor, the insulated standard drew the tiny figure in the silken swing up against the brass where the figure took on an electrical charge. Then off swung the little man to discharge his load of electricity against the ground contact post at the other end of the board.
This way, that way swung the tiny figure, an animated little cornstalk man that for all the world looked as if he was enjoying his high riding. Back and forth, back and forth he swung, pulled now by the positive, now by the negative power of that strange thing, electricity. And he continued to swing just as long as electrical power was supplied to him.
Shouts of laughter greeted the antics of Lee’s little man.
“This here electricity’s fun!”
“Better’n a show!”