"Yes; and observing, after I had rung, that all the shutters were still
closed, I felt ashamed of my own rash action, and made off rather than
brave the reproachful face of some injured housemaid, robbed of her
morning dreams. I turned down that pretty lane,--lured by the green
of the chestnut-trees,--caught sight of you through the window, took
courage, and here I am! You forgive me?" While thus speaking, he
continued to move along the littered floor of the dingy room, with the
undulating restlessness of some wild animal in the confines of its den,
and he now went on, in short fragmentary sentences, very slightly linked
together, but smoothed, as it were, into harmony by a voice musical and
fresh as a sky lark's warble. "Morning dreams, indeed! dreams that waste
the life of such a morning. Rosy magnificence of a summer dawn! Do you
not pity the fool who prefers to lie a bed, and to dream rather than to
live? What! and you, strong man, with those noble limbs, in this den! Do
you not long for a rush through the green of the fields, a bath in the
blue of the river?"

Here he came to a pause, standing, still in the gray light of the
growing day, with eyes whose joyous lustre forestalled the sun's, and
lips which seemed to laugh even in repose.

But presently those eyes, as quick as they were bright, glanced over the
walls, the floor, the shelves, the phials, the mechanical inventions,
and then rested full on my cylinder fixed to the table. He approached,
examined it curiously, asked what it was. I explained. To gratify him
I sat down and renewed my experiment, with equally ill success. The
needle, which should have moved from west to south, describing an angle
of from thirty degrees to forty or even fifty degrees, only made a few
troubled, undecided oscillations.

"Tut," cried the young man, "I see what it is; you have a wound in your
right hand."

That was true; I had burned my band a few days before in a chemical
experiment, and the sore had not healed.

"Well," said I, "and what does that matter?"

"Everything; the least scratch in the skin of the hand produces chemical
actions on the electric current, independently of your will. Let me
try."

He took my place, and in a moment the needle in the galvanometer
responded to his grasp on the cylinder, exactly as the inventive
philosopher had stated to be the due result of the experiment.

I was startled.

"But how came you, Mr. Margrave, to be so well acquainted