“I don't wish to disturb you,” said the boy, mildly, “you can read. I cannot; I have a fretful, impatient feeling over me that perhaps will go off with exercise. I'll set out, then, for a walk, and come back here towards evening, then go and dine at the Rocca, and afterwards whatever you please.” “If you say that, then,” said Billy, in a voice of evident delight, “we'll finish the day at the Professor Tadeucci's, and get him to go over that analysis again.” “I have no taste for chemistry. It always seems to me to end where it began,” said the boy, impatiently. “Where do all researches tend to? how are you elevated in intellect? how are your thoughts higher, wider, nobler, by all these mixings and manipulations?” “Is it nothing to know how thunder and lightning is made; to understand electricity; to dive into the secrets of that old crater there, and see the ingredients in the crucible that was bilin' three thousand years ago?” “These things appeal more grandly to my imagination when the mystery of their forces is unrevealed. I like to think of them as dread manifestations of a mighty will, rather than gaseous combinations or metallic affinities.” “And what prevents you?” said Billy, eagerly. “Is the grandeur of the phenomenon impaired because it is in part intelligible? Ain't you elevated as a reasoning being when you get what I may call a peep into God's workshop, rather than by implicitly accepting results just as any old woman accepts a superstition?” “There is something ignoble in mechanism,” said the boy, angrily. “Don't say that, while your heart is beatin' and your arteries is contractin; never say it as long as your lungs dilate or collapse. It's mechanism makes water burst out of the ground, and, swelling into streams, flow as mighty rivers through the earth. It's mechanism raises the sap to the topmost bough of the cedar-tree that waves over Lebanon. 'T is the same power moves planets above, just to show us that as there is nothing without a cause, there is one great and final 'Cause' behind all.” “And will you tell me,” said the boy, sneeringly, “that a sunbeam pours more gladness into your heart because a prism has explained to you the composition of light?” “God's blessings never seemed the less to me because he taught me the beautiful laws that guide them,” said Billy, reverently; “every little step that I take out of darkness is on the road, at least, to Him.” In part abashed by the words, in part admonished by the tone of the speaker, the boy was silent for some minutes. “You know, Billy,” said he, at length, “that I spoke in no irreverence; that I would no more insult your convictions than I would outrage my own. It is simply that it suits my dreamy indolence to like the wonderful better than the intelligible; and you must acknowledge that there never was so palatable a theory for ignorance.”