nervous and overwrought by the great anticipation, and
that he could not stand such a strain very long.

Then, two days before Christmas, he received a note saying that the new
piece was finished and had been sent to him by express. That was almost
too much happiness to bear, and when he found the heavy case at the
station the next morning, and got it put on a cart, his heart was doing
queer things, and he was as white as a sheet.

VIII

HOW THE WHEELS WENT ROUND AT LAST

The hush of Christmas Eve lay upon the tumble-down cottage, and on the
soft fresh snow outside, and the lamps were burning quietly in the
workshop, where father and son were sitting before the finished Motor.

The little City was there too, but not between them now, though Newton
had taken off its brown paper cover in honour of the great event which
was about to take place.

In order to be doubly sure of the result, and dreading even the
possibility of a little disappointment, Overholt had decided that he
would subject the only chemical substance which the machine consumed to
a final form of refinement by heat, melting, boiling and cooling it, all
of which would require an hour or more before it was quite ready. He
felt like a man who is going to risk his life over a precipice, trusting
to a single rope for safety; that one rope must not be even a little
chafed; if possible each strand must be perfect in itself, and all the
strands must be laid up without a fault. Of the rest, of the machine
itself, Overholt felt absolutely sure; yet although a slight impurity in
the chemical could certainly not hinder the whole from working, it might
interfere with the precision of the revolutions, or even cause the
engine to stop after a few hours instead of going on indefinitely, as
long as the supply of the substance produced the alternate disturbance
of equilibrium which was the main principle on which the machine
depended.

That sweetly prophetic evening silence, before the great feast of Good
Will, does not come over everything each year, even in a lonely cottage
in an abandoned farm in Connecticut, than which you cannot possibly
imagine anything more silent or more remote from the noise of the world.
Sometimes it rains in torrents just on that night, sometimes it blows a
raging gale that twists the leafless birches and elms and hickory trees
like dry grass and bends the dark firs and spruces as if they were
feathers, and you can hardly be heard