An immense grange had been built by a man named Abner Millikan, an ardent republican, who adorned the front walls of his farm with portraits of MacKinley and Hobart. During a violent storm that broke out, the building was struck by lightning several times, and it looked as though it were enveloped in great sheets of flame. Millikan, who had been at some distance from the spot, rushed thither much alarmed, and found to his relief that no damage had been done. The portraits alone had been destroyed, and--here is the strange detail--the lightning had traced the politicians' features upon the wall. Certainly lightning plays queer pranks. And I have said nothing yet of the photographs lightning sometimes takes. _Pranks_ they seem to us, but we may be sure there is some method in their mischievousness. It is the same with women. Women in their caprices are but obeying some law of nature. They are not so capricious as they seem. These strange facts teach us, anyway, not for the first time, that our knowledge of the universe is still very incomplete, and that its study is worth following up in all its chapters. We may be certain that electricity exercises a much more important influence in nature than is generally supposed, and that it plays a _rôle_ in our own lives which is still practically unrecognized. In the oppression we feel before the coming of a storm, and the sense of relief we experience when it has passed, we have an instance of the way in which physical and moral influences are apt to blend or overlap. CHAPTER II ATMOSPHERIC ELECTRICITY AND STORM-CLOUDS With such strange facts before us--facts the strangeness and diversity of which baffle all hypotheses and forbid all definite conclusions--we can but keep adding to our observations and accumulating other facts which may tend to elucidate the mystery. The terrible ravages caused every year by lightning make it necessary for us to find some means of preventing the recurrence of certain memorable catastrophes. It is only in the actual investigation of the phenomenon, in the study of all its smallest manifestations, that we can hope to discover the methods of the mysterious power. From the earliest times mankind has devoted much thought to the subject. If we glance back towards past centuries we find that thunder and lightning have ever been regarded as a terrible agent of the will of the powers above. The strongest and subtlest brains of antiquity, Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Seneca, were unable to form any kind of reasonable view regarding the fantastic phenomena resulting from the force of nature and held so mysterious to us moderns. Thunder and lightning were generally believed by them to be due to emanations from the earth or to vapours contained in the air.