s body and stored his mind.
Among other things, she early taught him to read from the Bible.

As Robin grew he waxed strong and bold and lively, becoming a source of
much anxiety, mingled with delight, to his mother, and of considerable
alarm, mixed with admiration and surprise, to his father. He possessed
an inquisitive mind. He inquired into everything--including the antique
barometer and the household clock, both of which were heirlooms, and
were not improved by his 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.

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, alth