Page:Peak and Prairie (1894).pdf/391

 mentous statement in a postscript down in one corner and to sign it "Waldy."

He was so near his journey's end that he allowed himself rather a longer nooning than usual. He stretched himself on his back on the pine needles, and with his hands clasped behind his head, he gazed up through the spreading branches to the marvellous blue of the sky. When he should be a scientific man and know all sorts of things besides geology,—meteorology and chemistry and the like,—perhaps he should find out why the sky looked so particularly deep and palpitating when you were lying flat on your back and there were some pine branches in between. He meant, one of these days, to know everything there was to be known, and to discover a little something new besides.

A train of cars thundered by on the other side of the brook not thirty yards from his feet. He did not change his position, but looking down the long length of his legs, he saw the roaring, snorting beast of an engine rush by, trailing its tail of cars behind it.

"And yet the power isn't in the steam," he thought to himself, "but in the brain that controls it. Just the brain. That's all." At the thought a sudden impatience seized