Page:Ballantyne--The Battery and the Boiler.djvu/21

 inquiries. Strange to say, Robin's chief delight in those early days was a thunderstorm. The rolling of heaven's artillery seemed to afford inexpressible satisfaction to his little heart, but it was the lightning that affected him most. It filled him with a species of awful joy. No matter how it came—whether in the forked flashes of the storm, or the lambent gleamings of the summer sky—he would sit and gaze at it in solemn wonder. Even in his earliest years he began to make inquiries into that remarkable and mysterious agent.

"Musser," he said one day, during a thunderstorm, raising his large eyes to his mother's face with intense gravity,—"Musser, what is lightenin'?"

Mrs. Wright, who was a soft little unscientific lady with gorgeous eyes, sat before her son perplexed.

"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.