9. Now the master has set everything to rights, and is ready to go home to dinner. Yet he goes reluctantly. The old man has spent so much of his life in the smoky, noisy, buzzing school-room, that, when he has a holiday, he feels as if his place were lost, and himself a stranger in the World.
Hawthorne.
XXXV.—STORY OF FRANKLIN'S KITE.
1. It was in the spring of 1752 that Franklin thought of trying the experiment with a kite; and it was during one of the June thunder-storms of that year that the immortal kite was flown.
2. Who does not know the story? How he made his kite of a large silk handkerchief, and fastened to the top of the perpendicular stick a piece of sharpened iron wire. How he stole away, upon the approach of a storm, into the common not far from his own house, say about the corner of Race and Eighth Streets, near a spot where there was an old cow-shed. How, wishing to avoid the ridicule of possible failure, he told no one what he was going to do, except his son, who accompanied him, and who was then not the small boy he is represented in a hundred pictures, but a braw lad of twenty-two, one of the beaux of Philadelphia.
3. How the kite was raised in time for the coming gust, the string being hempen, except the part held in the hand, which was silk. How, at the termination of the hempen string, a common key was fastened; and in the shed was deposited a Leyden bottle, in which to collect from the clouds, if the clouds should contain it, the material requisite for an electric shock. How father and son stood for some time under the shed, presenting the spectacle, if there had been any one to behold it, of two escaped lunatics, flying a kite in the rain; the young gentleman, no doubt, feeling a little foolish. How, at last, when a thunder-cloud appeared to pass directly over the kite, and yet no sign of electricity appeared the hopes of the father, too, began to grow faint. How, when both were ready to despair of success, Franklin's heart stood still as he suddenly observed the fibers of the hempen string to rise, as a boy's hair rises when he stands on the insulating-stool. How, with eager, trembling hand, he applied his knuckle to the key, and drew therefrom an unmistakable spark, and another and another, and as many as he chose. How the Leyden vial was charged, and both received the most thrilling shock ever experienced by man; a shock that might have been figuratively styled electric, if electric it had not really been. How, the wet kite being drawn in, and the apparatus packed, the philosopher went home exulting, the happiest philosopher in Christendom.
4. And this was only the beginning of triumph. The next ships that arrived from the Old World brought him the news that the same experiment, in the mode originally suggested by him, of erecting an iron rod upon an eminence, had been successfully performed in France, so that his name had suddenly become one of the most famous in Europe.