But in spite of the bitterness which the innocent old man thus aroused in her, she presently owed a debt to John Burroughs. She found him ironically asking if it helps us to think of the soul in terms of light, or radioactivity. She pondered that and differed with him. It certainly did help her to think of Horatio’s soul as light or electricity. As for radioactivity, she had never thought of it at all. She knew the word, but it had meant no more to her than the phosphorescence that she saw in Wah-wah-taysee, the firefly. In the Britannica she at once found an article on radioactivity. It had long been lying there unobserved, quite after the fashion of other divine riches. She read it with amazement, and though it offered no theory of matter, arose with the conviction that matter is built up from hydrogen, which is merely the smallest neutral unit of electricity. She had found the one substance. She guessed that all the lovely colors and shapes of earth are made by the different arrangements of electricity. By the time supper was over she was living in a new world, feeding on electricity. Her star had become electric to the core. Sunlight was still reflected from the sphere, but the sphere itself was lightning. After she washed the dishes she went out and looked at the universe. The neutral lightning called the St Mary’s was flowing peacefully. The neutral lightning called her island seemed immobile, but was vibrating in every atom. The pines were not coruscating, but garbed their thunderbolts in shadowy green. And so the spring of 1921 passed into summer, opening her eyes. A billion years ago this gem beneath her feet had been an ammunition dump constantly exploding. For some reason God had slowly closed His hand around it and almost hushed it. Chapter 82. Lead Almost, but not quite. Lightning still escaped from earth in the form called life. Wherever there was water, it stole forth as liquid voltaic cells. It was balanced and bottled in animals, but always enough escaped to drive them. It drove fish through the water like darts. It drove the wings of flies so fast that no eye could follow them. It flashed out in the tongues of snakes. In her own body it carried messages from her fingers to her brain at the rate of several miles a second. Such were the thoughts that haunted her all that spring, and a dry hot spring it was. There seemed to be no more rain along the St. Mary’s than there had been the summer before along the Volga. Even in the clearing, where the grass had been lusty for a year, the ground began to look yellow. The gift of half a dozen sheep from Chase Mahan arrived, but they found little food. The mosquitoes, which usually hold their revel for about a month along the river, failed to come. On the other hand, the mayflies, which usually lie hid in the river till July, arrived a month earlier.