The night of his return I found him overhauling instruments at his bench, but as I came in he dropped his work and his face brightened. “How goes it?” I asked. “Swift,” he answered. “I've been helping 'em lay a track for lightning. A stream o' power is flashing over the hills to Merrifield this minute. Do you see that wire that goes by the window there? Well, it's a nerve out o' the brain o' the universe, an' we're connected. It makes us a part o' the great body o' the world, as ye might say. “There's goin' to be a war between life an' death in this country. In Heartsdale you an' I will lead the new army. Boggs an' Crocket will command the old.” That little shop was for me “the House of the Interpreter,” and there I began to get the drift of things. He gave me a book which contained the Morse alphabet, and taught me to make the letters on a telegraph key, and showed me how it checked the current and so produced the dots and dashes. “I'll run a wire to your house,” he promised, “an' we'll string our thoughts on it an' learn some useful knowledge. I can get a place for you as soon as you can read an' send the current, I never liked the headstone business. It's at the wrong end o' the line. If it was the cradle business, I'd like it better. Life is the thing for you an' me, not death. “There's four churches and two cemeteries in this little town. Life here has been a kind o' preparation for the grave, an' not much else. Death has done most o' the business. It's time we had a change.” I was to help the swift, mysterious current of power to quicken the minds of the people. Pearl lent me a telegraph key, and I stayed at home with my mother and sister for a few weeks, learning how to sound the letters on it. I went often to Pearl's shop of an evening and talked with him by telegraphy, and he was pleased with my progress, and within a month said I was good enough for any place on the line. We felt his kindness deeply there in the Mill House, and my mother wrote her thanks to him, and begged him to come and sup and spend the evening with us any day. “My friend and fellow-citizen,” said Mr. Pearl, when I saw him again, “nothing would please me better than to sit by your fireside and enjoy all that exalts and embellishes civilized life. But, firstly, I am not decent enough; and, secondly, my clothing is fit only for the 'sacred precinks' o' my own shop, as Mr. Boggs would say; and, thirdly, I have a lot to do an' only sixteen hours a day to do it in.” So he never came to the Mill House, and, although my mother had called twice at his shop to tell her gratitude, she had not been able to find him. One day he gave me glad news in this manner: “How would ye like a job?” “What kind of a job?” I inquired. “To jerk lightnin'.” That was his way of describing the work of an operator. “I'd like it very much.” “You're to take the office in Heartsdale at forty dollars a month on trial,” he said.