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 about it, because he was so handsome, and had such nice eyes, and the way he held back seemed to make it more mysterious and exciting.

"I am a digger," he said at last—"a poor, miserable, lonely digger. I dig and dig, and the deeper I get the less I appear to accomplish. To put it into common English, I am engaged in electrical research, not of the profitable, ingenious, touch-the-button kind, but in the study of some great basic, perhaps insoluble, phenomena that we have been content to name and then ignore—a scientific procedure more universal than you'd think."

He paused, and it seemed only polite on my part to ask him how he was getting on.

"Wait twenty years, and then, perhaps, I'll answer you," he returned. "Have you ever been a victim of those schoolboy jokes, when you open your parcel and then find another parcel inside of that, and another inside of that, and so on and so on? Well, that's what science is, only, in our case, there are a million