“Well, child, it is—it—really, I don’t know what it is!”
“Don’t know?” echoed Robin, with surprise, “I sought you know’d everysing.”
“No, not everything, dear,” replied Mrs Wright, with a deprecatory smile; “but here comes your father, who will tell you.”
“Does he know everysing?” asked the child.
“N–no, not exactly; but he knows many things—oh, ever so many things,” answered the cautious wife and mother.
The accountant had barely crossed his humble threshold and sat down, when Robin clambered on his knee and put the puzzling question.—“Fasser, what is lightenin’?”
“Lightning, my boy?—why, it’s—it’s—let me see—it’s fire, of course, of some sort, that comes out o’ the clouds and goes slap into the earth—there, don’t you see it?”
Robin did see it, and was so awestruck by the crash which followed the blinding flash that he forgot at the moment to push his inquiries further, much to his father’s satisfaction, who internally resolved to hunt up the Encyclopaedia Britannica that very evening—letter L—and study it.
In process of time Robin increased in size. As he expanded in body he developed in mind and in heart, for his little mother, although profoundly ignorant of electricity and its effects, was deeply learned in the Scriptures. But Robin did not hunger in vain after scientific knowledge. By good fortune he had a cousin—cousin Sam Shipton—who was fourteen years older than himself, and a clerk at a neighbouring railway station, where there was a telegraphic instrument.
Now, Sam, being himself possessed of strongly scientific tendencies, took a great fancy to little Robin, and sought to enlighten his young mind on many subjects where “musser’s” knowledge failed. Of course he could not explain all that he himself knew about electricity—the child was too young for that,—but he did what he could, and introduced him one day to the interior of the station, where he filled his youthful mind with amazement and admiration by his rapid, and apparently meaningless, manipulation of the telegraph instrument.