“To tell you that there is a storm coming your way.”
“Well, I cannot stop it—”
“No, but I wanted to ask if you had taken care to shut your window—”
Mrs. Scorbitt had hardly ended before a tremendous clap of thunder filled the air. It seemed as though a vast sheet of silk had been torn apart for an infinity of length. The lightning had flashed down over Ballistic Cottage, and, conducted by the telephone-wire, had invaded the mathematician’s room with a brutality quite electric.
J. T. Maston, bending over the mouthpiece of the instrument, received the hardest voltaic knock that had ever found the mouth of a philosopher. The flash had run along his metal hook, and spun him round like a teetotum. The blackboard he struck with his back was hurled down in the corner. And the lightning disappeared out of window.
Stunned for a moment—and it was a wonder it was no worse—J. T. Maston slowly rose, and rubbed the different parts of his body to make sure he was not hurt.
Then, having lost none of his coolness, as beseemed the ancient pointer of the Columbiad, he put his room in order, picked up his easel, hoisted up his blackboard, gathered up the fragments of chalk scattered on the carpet, and resumed his work, which had been so rudely interrupted.
But he noticed that by the fall of the blackboard the figures he had written on the right-hand top corner, which represented in meters the approximate equatorial circumference of the earth, had been partially erased. He stretched his hook up to re-write them when the bell sounded with a feverish tinkle.
“Again!” exclaimed J. T. Maston. And he went to the telephone.
“Who is there?” he asked.