The Battery and the Boiler: Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables - R. M. Ballantyne

Presenting this to her daughter, she said. “May I send it?”

Letta once more covered her face with her hands, and blushed.

Thus it came to pass that our hero’s fate in life, as well as his career, was decided by the electric telegraph.

But the best of it was that Robin did go to India after all—as if to do despite to his friends, who had said he must not go. Moreover, he took Letta with him, and he hunted many a day through the jungles of that land in company with his friend Redpath, and his henchman Flinn. And, long afterwards, he returned to England, a sturdy middle-aged man, with a wife whose beauty was unabated because it consisted, chiefly, in that love of heart to God and man which lends never-fading loveliness to the human countenance.

Awaiting them at home was a troop of little ones—the first home-instalment of a troop of lesser ones who accompanied the parent stems. All of these, besides being gifted with galvanic energy and flashing eyes, were impressed with the strong conviction, strange to say, that batteries, boilers, and submarine cables, were the most important things in the whole world, and the only subjects worth being played at by reasonable human children.

The End.