Page:Ballantyne--The Battery and the Boiler.djvu/410

 difficult to move as if it had been sticking in cheese—though it was in reality touching nothing!—influenced only by attraction. ('That beats your power over Sam, Madge,' whispered Robin. 'No it doesn't,' whispered Madge in reply.) Then, one most beautiful experiment I could not hope to get you to understand, but its result was, that a ten-gallon glass jar, coated inside and out with perforated squares of tinfoil, was filled with tens of thousands of brilliant sparks, which produced so much noise as completely to drown the voices of those who described the experiment. A knowledge of these and other deep things, and of the laws that govern them, has enabled Sir William Thomson and Mr. Cromwell F. Varley to expedite the transmission of messages through very long submarine cables in an enormous degree. Then the aurora borealis was illustrated by a large long exhausted tube—"

"I say, Sam," interrupted Rik, "don't you think there 's just a possibility of our becoming a large long-exhausted company if you don't bring this interesting lecture to a close?"

"Shame! shame! uncle Rik," cried Robin,

As the rest of the company sided with him, the captain had to give way, and Sam went on.

"I won't try your patience much longer; in fact I have nearly come to an end. In this long