"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 with a scientific process little known, and but recently discovered?" "I well acquainted! not so. But I am fond of all experiments that relate to animal life. Electricity, especially, is full of interest."