“I know a little south of England village,” she said, in her soft, flute-like contralto, “I know a little village, nestling down among green hills, a little town of gardens and ivy and walls and thatches, in a country of brooks and hawthorn hedges—a little village where the nightingales sing at night, and the skylarks sing by day, and the old men and women have rosy faces, and the girls are shy and soft-spoken—” “But we’d die of loneliness in that sort of place, wouldn’t we?” “No, Jim, we should get more out of life than you dream. Then, in the winter, we could slip over to Paris and the Riviera, or down to Rome—it can be done cheaply, if one knows how—and before you realized it you would be used to the quiet and the change, and even learn to like it.” “Yes,” he said wearily. “I’ve had too much of this wear-and-tear life—even though it has its thrill now and then. It’s intoxicating enough, but we’ve both had too much of this drinking wine out of a skull. Even at the best it’s feasting on a coffin-lid, isn’t it?” She was still gazing out of the window with unseeing eyes. “And there is so much to read, and study, and learn,” Durkin himself went on, more eagerly. “I might get a chance to work out my amplifier then, as I used to think I would, some day. If I could once get that sort of relay sensitive enough, and worked out the way I feel it can be worked out, you would be able to sit in Chicago and talk right through to London!” “But how?” she asked. “I always wanted to get a link between the cable and the ordinary Morse recorder, and I know it can be done. Then—who knows—I might in time go Lee De Forest one better, and have my amplifier knock his old-fashioned electrolytic out of business, for good.” Then he fell to talking about wireless and transmitters and conductors, and suddenly broke into a quiet chuckle of laughter. “I don’t think I ever told you about the fun we had down in that Broadway conduit. It was after the fire in the Subway and the Postal-Union terminal rooms. A part of the conduit roof had been cleared away by the firemen. Well, while we were working down there a big Irish watering-cart driver thought he’d have some fun with us, and every time he passed up and down with his cart he’d give us a shower. It got monotonous, after the fourth time or so, and the boys began to cuss. I saw that his wagon was strung with metal from one end to the other. I also knew that water was a good enough conductor. So I just exposed a live wire of interesting voltage and waited for the water-wagon. The driver came along as bland and innocent-looking as a baby. Then he veered over and doused us, the same as ever. Then the water and the wire got together. That Irishman gave one jump—he went five feet up in the air, and yelled—oh, how he yelled!—and ran like mad up Broadway, with a policeman after him, thinking he’d suddenly gone mad, trying to soothe him and quiet him down!”