St. Nicholas/Volume 40/Number 12/With Men Who Do Things
WITH MEN WHO DO THINGS
BY A. RUSSELL BOND
Author of “The Scientific American Boy” and “Handyman’s Workshop and Laboratory”
Chapter XIV
THOUSANDS TALKING AT ONCE
Tunneling a city street is no simple task under any conditions. There were sewer-pipes, gas-pipes, water-pipes, electric light and power conduits, telephone, telegraph, and fire-alarm conduits, and the conduits for the underground trolley system of the electric cars, to be avoided. The gas-mains were elevated above the streets so that there would be no danger of an explosion, should they develop a leak, Of course, the man-holes or underground chambers, where connections were made with the telephone-lines, had to be torn away, exposing the lead-sheathed telephone cables. To protect these cables from the picks and shovels of careless laborers, they were wrapped thickly with burlap.
A telephone lineman was down under the planking one morning, making some new cable connections. He was pouring hot, melted paraffin on the splice to drive out all moisture before covering it with lead, when some of the oil spattered over on his fire. Before he knew it, there was a lively blaze, which caught the burlap, melted the lead off the cables, and consumed the insulation of the copper wires within, Choking with smoke and the fumes of burning insulation, the lineman staggered out of the tunnel, yelling “Fire.” By the time the engines came up, the planking was burning briskly, and the firemen had their troubles getting this queer blaze under control.
The fire was all out when Will and I arrived on the scene. Pushing his way through the crowd as if he had the right, Will led the way to the opening in the planking, and disappeared quickly down a ladder, I ran down after him into the charred subway. It took several moments to adjust my eyes to the twilight below, and then the sight that met them was appalling. There were thousands and thousands of copper wires burned, torn, and fused together, and matted with splashes of lead, all mixed up in the worst snarl imaginable. How could such a tangle ever be straightened out? Did we but know it, hundreds of subscribers, at that very moment, were frantically rattling their receiver hooks, shouting for “central,” threatening to report these stupid telephone operators, and sending by messenger to have their “pesky ‘phones” attended to.
Already there was a force of men at work trying to repair the damage. First they cut away the snarls, and then they tested each pair of wires individually. A telephone circuit always consists of two wires twisted together, and so it was easy to tell which two wires belonged to each other. Nevertheless, it was important to test each wire of a pair, to make sure that it was electrically sound. In order to identify the pairs at the central station, a wire of a certain number would be grounded, and then the repairman, with a telegraph battery and relay connected to ground, would search through the wires until he found one which would make his telegraph instrument click. Then he would secure that wire in an index board, sticking it through a hole labeled with the number of the wire.
We watched this numbering process for a time, but soon grew tired. It was so monotonous and so hopelessly slow. The men thought so themselves, evidently, because, after a time, the order came to connect up the wires in any way possible, and they would be straightened out at the central station. There the cables would be cut again and the lines sorted out.
After we had been there some time, and were starting off to get lunch, I noticed that a man was watching us rather curiously.
“Hello,” he said; “what are you doing down here?”
“Just looking on,” I answered. “There was n’t anybody to stop us, so we came on down.”
“Well, I venture to say you never saw a sight like this before. I am sure I never did in all my telephone experience. Seven thousand wires all matted like wool! Not all telephone wires, either. We are in a general mixup with the telegraph and fire-alarm circuits, too.”
“I suppose this cripples the whole city,” ventured Will,
“The whole city? Ha, ha, ha! The whole city, did you say? There are five hundred thousand telephones here in this city, You just look at a telephone directory, that will give you some idea of the enormous extent of New York's telephone system, Do you know, we print carloads of those directories every year, and, would you believe it, they use up seven tons of ink! Why, you have no idea of what a lot of telephone wires there are buried in these streets. New York is a regular copper-mine, There are over seventeen million pounds of it and forty-four million pounds of lead in our cables.”
“1 suppose it is worth something, too.”
“Well, ] should say so! Something like twelve million dollars, all told.”
“It is lucky you have it all buried underground, for people would he stealing it,” I remarked.
“Unfortunately it is n't all buried. Only our city wires run in conduits, and we have an underground long-distance line running from Boston to Washington. All the rest of our wires are out in the open, and now and then some of the copper is stolen; but that does n’t happen very often now, not since our experience with the wire thieves on the Jersey meadows. I suppose you read about it in the papers.”
We scented a good story, and urged the man to tell us all about it, which he did very willingly.
SORTING OUT A TANGLE OF WIRES AT THE BACK OF A DISTRIBUTING FRAME.
“Well, it was the most exciting time we ever had with wire thieves. ‘Cy’ Hummer earned his money that trip anyway,” he said, laughing heartily. “There had been a gang of thieves at work on that lonesome spot for some time. They had
THE DISTRIBUTING FRAME WHERE THE WIRES ARE CONNECTED TO A PERFECT MAZE OF SAFETY DEVICES. given us a lot of trouble, and we realized that something would have to be done. We knew just about where those fellows were most liable to play their little game, so we fixed up a little game of our own to match theirs. We have a private detective that beats any you ever heard of, and does n’t cost anything like as much. It is an innocent-looking little mahogany box that we put on the line when we suspect trouble. The box contains a telegraph relay, a dry-battery cell, and an electric bell, We ran a current of electricity from Newark over one of our bare copper wires to this detector, which was placed in Jersey City. Then we knew that, if the wire was cut, or if any other wire crossed it, or if there was any meddling whatever, the alarm would go off in our Jersey City central, and immediately the news would be telephoned to the police at Jersey City and at Kearney. At each place there was an automobile standing ready to make a dash upon the thieves and head them off, no matter in which direction they tried to escape. We had some trouble in getting an automobile at Kearney, but a friend of mine finally located a farmer near by who had an old touring car, 1 went around with him to make the bargain. Cy Hummer, his namewas, and he was a typical hayseed, a long, lanky fellow, chewing a straw when I saw him, just the kind of a chap that you see in the comic papers, but the queerest combination of nerve and timidity I ever ran up against. I did n’t believe that he could ran a car until he took us out for a spin. Well, sir, the way he sent us around corners on two wheels, shot into town, dodged around the traffic, and then raced back to the farm at a fifty--mile clip, running down two hens and a stray dog, all the time chewing away at that straw as if he had nothing more exciting on hand than feeding the stock,—all that, I say, took my breath away, and when I staggered out of the back seat of that vehicle, I went up to him, and said, ‘Mr. Cyrus Hammer, let me shake your hand. You certainly understand your business, and I must have you for this job. I will pay you eight dollars a night to stay with your rig at the police station, ready to take them out the instant you get the alarm, and while you are out on the job, you will get four dollars an hour extra.’ You should have seen Cy Hummer's eyes open at the prospect of such wealth. ‘B-b-but, the thieves,’ he sputtered. ‘Oh, you need not worry about them,’ put in my friend. ‘The police will take care of them. All you need do is to drive the car, You ‘d better take the job, Cy, it ’s the easiest money you will ever see.’ So Cy took the job, and he was there every night puttering about his machine for about two weeks. Then, about two o’clock one morning, on a particularly dark night, the alarm went off. Immediately our operator notified the Jersey City and Kearney police, and the game was on. In less than a minute, the Kearney men were tearing full speed down the road, following the telephone wires. Cy 
THE “A” BOARD OF A BUSY CENTRAL STATION. SCORES OF GIRLS ATTENDING TO THE CALLS OF THOUSANDS OF SUBSCRIBERS. knew every inch of that road like a horse. It was well he did, because it was pretty dark, and, of course, the machine carried no lights. When they had covered about two or three miles, they made out a dark object that looked like a truck wagon drawn up along the roadside. The next instant, there was a volley of shots which smashed the wind-shield to bits, and peppered the car-with 
A CORNER OF THE SWITCHBOARD VIEWED FROM THE REAR. THE WHITE BANDS ABOVE AND BELOW ARE CABLES CONTAINING TELEPHONE WIRES. buck-shot. ‘Stop the car and scatter,’ cried the police sergeant, but Cy had already jammed on the emergency brakes and brought the car up with such a jerk that they were all but pitched out. Then the police ran for cover, but in the meantime
a second volley caught them. The sergeant got a rifle-ball in the fleshy part of his back, one of his men got a load of shot in the calf of his leg, while the other man had a clean hole drilled through
the lobe of his ear with a buck-shat. As for Cy’’—here the narrator had a fit of laughing—“Cy tumbled down behind the dash-board the instant he jammed on the brakes; but he was not built right for that cramped shelter, His lanky legs hung way down over the side, and a rifle-bullet cut through his trousers, grazing one of his shins, The crippled police answered very bravely with their revolvers, but what could their little pea-shooters do against rifles and shot-guns? In another moment, the thieves had whipped up their horses and disappeared down the road, A quarter of an hour later, the other police arrived, gathered up the wounded, and helped to restore Cy Hummer to his senses. Poor Cy was astonished to find that his only injury was a wounded trouser-leg.”
“But did n’t the police head off the thieves?” I asked.
“No, and I don’t quite understand it. ‘They did n’t follow the telephone-line out of town, but took another road, and then when they heard the shooting, they struck back into the meadow road, but from the Kearney end. However, we are on the track of the men now. We offered a reward at once, and only the other day a farmer reported to the Jersey City police that his neighbor's boys came in just before daybreak on the morning of the shooting with the horses all covered with perspiration, and they had two shot-guns with them. There was a man with them as well, who had a rifle, and, from the description, we have just about identified him as a lineman we ‘fired’ two years ago, We ‘ll have them before long, and send them up the river for a term. They won’t be the first, either. Those chaps have learned that it ’s dangerous to meddle with our lines. They are sure to be caught sooner or later. The same with our prepay stations. We used to have the cash-boxes tabbed every once in a while, until we began putting in automatic alarms, Then we caught so many of the thieves that they soon gave up that kind of work as unprofitable. Some of the tricks they played were mighty ingenious.”
We were anticipating another interesting story, when our new acquaintance suddenly looked at his watch.
“Great Scott! Lunch-time ’s almost up!” he exclaimed, “I ‘ll have to chase out of here. Say, if you want to know something about telephoning, come around to my office, But don’t turn up for a few days, until we get this mess of wiring all straightened out,” he said, handing us his card.
Will and I had a long argument as to how many days “a few” meant, Finally, we decided that it could not be less than three, and so, on the third day, we boldly invaded Mr, Burt’s office.
“Glad to see you, boys!” he said cordially. “I ‘m going to take you around myself, The best place to start in is at the bottom.” Mr, Burt led us out to the elevator. We stopped off at the ground floor, and went down a flight of stairs to the basement, and into the cable vault. There was nothing to see here but forty or fifty lead-covered cables.
“This is where the cables come in from the street,” explained Mr. Burt, “and run to the boards up-stairs. There are hundred pairs of wires in each cable, and they are just humming with talk.”
“What, those silent cables!” I ejaculated. It seemed absurd. The stillness in that vault was 
AN OPERATOR AT THE “B” BOARD. WITHIN HER REACH ARE TEN THOUSAND AND TWO HUNDRED “JACKS.” almost oppressive when its echoes were not disturbed by our voices and the scraping of our feet on the concrete floor.
“Yes, they are just throbbing with life, hundreds, even thousands, all talking at once. You know we Americans do more ‘phoning than any other people on earth, Why, last year, we held fourteen and a half billion conversations, and that is two thirds of the telephone talks of the whole world. A pretty big share of those conversations took place right here in New York. There are twice as many telephones in this city as in all of France, and nearly as many as in the whole of Great Britain. There is a phone in this country for every twelve people. If only your cars were electrical, and you could hear all the electrical vibrations passing through those cables, you would find those silent lines a perfect babel
of noise—a sample of every tongue on earth, from Chinese to Bulgarian, shouting and scolding, laughing and weeping maybe. Very likely
THE SHIP “CHRISTIAN X," PROPELLED BY THE OIL-BURNING DIESEL ENGINE. “‘WHY IT HASN'T ANY SMOKESTACKS!’ EXCLAIMED WILL.” (SEE PAGE 1091.) fortunes are being made and lost over these wires at this very moment, for we are very close to the
financial district of the city. But we are stone-deaf to it all until the electrical waves are turned into air waves by the telephone receiver. Possibly some of these lines are carrying urgent messages as far as Chicago or St. Louis, or even Denver. I figured out that it takes twenty carloads of copper to carry your voice from New York to Chicago. So, you see, minutes are precious on our long-distance lines, and when wire thieves cut our wires, the interruption of business means more to us than the loss of the copper.”
We stepped out of the cable vault into a room filled with coils and coils of cable and wire that reminded me of the tangle we had seen in the subway. Mr. Burt informed us that this was the wiring for the Manhattan Syndicate Building. “We used to do all the work at the building,” he said, “but now we save time and expense by making our layout here, and then the whole cable, with all its tap-offs, is taken to the top of the building and dropped down the cable shaft. We have it so fixed that there are the proper outlets at each floor, so that all the men have to do at the building is to make the connections at each office, as required. In a building like that, we have two hundred and thirty miles of telephone wiring, enough to reach from New York to Washington, and, as you can imagine, it takes some careful estimating to get the wires in just the right place.” On the third floor of the building, we saw how the cables open out into myriads of wires and are connected to a perfect maze of safety devices on the distributing frames. Even here, the system was perfectly cold and silent, and it was difficult to realize the feverish activity that was throbbing through those “copper nerves,” as Mr. Burt called them, The distributing frames fairly dazzled us with their complexity,
“Will it sting me if I touch it?” asked Will, reaching his finger to one of the contacts.
He was rather daring, I thought, but Mr. Burt laughed. “Why, boy, you could n’t feel it, Don’t you know that the telephone is one of the most delicate of instruments? We use twenty-four volts to force the current through the miles of wire, but the talking currents themselves are so feeble that it takes a very sensitive apparatus to find them. They are measured in thousandths of an ampere, and you know what that is, when you can get anywhere from six to thirty amperes out of an ordinary dry-battery cell.”
“But I got a pretty bad shock the other day,” said Will, “when I was using the ‘phone, and I felt as if I had been stung by a hornet.”
THE ENGINE-ROOM OF THE “CHRISTIAN X.”
“That was the ringing current. Somebody was trying to ring your bell while you had your hand on the binding-posts at the end of the receiver. We have to use a more powerful current to make the bell ring, but the telephone itself is so sensitive that we have to guard against any excess of current. On this frame here, we have lightning arresters, heat coils, and fuses that will melt through if too heavy a current should come over the wires, as, for instance, if any electric-light wires should happen to cross one of our wires. Over there on that frame, the wires are sorted out, arranged in groups, and connected with the switchboard above. Before we go up there, I will show you the battery room.”
‘There, for the first time, we began to see some life. Not in the batteries themselves—they were as dead as all the rest of the system—but in a frame alongside in which there were hundreds of little can-like boxes; “line and cut-off relays,” Mr. Burt called them. They were clicking oafter the other, here one and there, all over the frame. Mr. Burt explained that these relays switched in the extra current to light the signal-lamps at the switchboard.
“Now for the switchboards, the most interesting part of all,” said Mr. Burt, as he led the way to the floor above. When he opened the door, I imagined he had taken us into a beehive. There was a steady hum, like the droning of bees. It took me a minute or two to realize that the noise was the talking of scores, yes, hundreds of girls. We could n’t see them all at once, because the room was shaped like a ⏋; but as we walked on around, we found that the entire outer wall was lined with switchhoards before which the girls were seated on high stools so close to each other that they nearly touched elbows. Each one had a receiver at her ear and a horn-shaped transmitter hanging before her mouth, That left both hands free to work, and those hands were certainly busy, picking up “plugs” on the ends of cords and sticking them into holes in the board in front of them. The cords were crisscrossed all over the board, while colored lights flashed up here and there, and, above all, that droning sound. If you stopped to listen to any particular girl, you could hear her saying, “Number, please,” “Audubon 12953, Cortlandt 10476,” “Line is busy,” etc.
“Looks pretty complicated, does n't it?”
“Well, rather,” I exclaimed, “I can see that it would take a week of hard study to understand it all.”
“But it is really very simple, you know,” said Mr. Burt. “If you could only forget that there are thousands of circuits here, you would understand it very readily. It is the repetitions that make it seem so complicated, Now, this switchboard is divided into two parts. We call one the ‘A’ board, it takes up about two thirds of the room; and the other is the ‘B’ board. Suppose you were a subscriber connected with this central, and wished to call up some one also connected with this central. As soon as you took your receiver off the hook, a lamp would light up somewhere on the ‘A’ board, and any one of three or four girls who were nearest that lamp would put a plug on one end of a cord into the jack of your circuit, and say, ‘Number, please.’ As soon as she received the number, she would put the plug on the other end of the cord into the jack, or hole, of the number you called. Now, that is simple enough, is n’t it? You see, she has within her reach the lines of all the subscribers of this central station.”
“But suppose [ wanted a subscriber in some other central?”
“All right. Say you wanted five thousand and something Murray Hill. Your ‘A’ operator would repeat the number to a ‘B’ operator at Murray Hill, The ‘B’ operator would tell the ‘A’ operator to use trunk line No, 8, we ‘ll say, and then would put the plug on the end of that trunk in the jack, or hole, bearing the number you called for.”
“Do you mean every girl has five thousand of those holes, or jacks, as you call them, within reach without leaving her chair?”
“Yes, ten thousand. In each panel there are seventeen hundred jacks, and each girl can cover six panels by reaching across her neighbors. The panels in sets of six are repeated many times all along the ‘B’ board, so that every ‘B’ girl has, access to every subscriber of her central station.”
“It is n’t so very hard to understand, after all,” I admitted.
“I thought you would find it simple, and it ’s quick, too, is n't it? In Paris, not long ago, a record was made of the time it takes to call up a subscriber, and the average was found to be 1 minute 208 seconds. Here in New York the average is eleven seconds! It takes training to do that. We have schools for the girls, and we pay them while they are learning the trade. We have schools for boys, too, who want to go into the telephone business. When you graduate from college, you had better come around. We pay students well while training them.”
Will was interested at once, and asked all sorts of questions, but as for me, I kept quiet. I was n't going to college. I had no rich Uncle Edward to help me out.
Chapter XV
IGNITING OIL BY COMPRESSION
“Why, it’s a Diesel-engined ship, the first to visit this country,” he replied, in answer to Will's query. “I suppose your Uncle Edward has told you all about Diesel engines?"
Will shook his head.
“What! did n't he tell you anything about them? Why, one of the principal objects of his visit abroad this year was to make a study of these new engines. That was why I asked you to join our party. It just occurred to me this morning at breakfast, and I sent James out with the telegram at once.”
“It was awfully good of you,” said Will, “and we are both anxious to see that steamer, but we don't know anything about her engines.”
“Well, I should say you did n't, or you would n’t call her a steamer,” answered Mr. Price. “She does n't use steam at all, A Diesel engine is something like an automobile engine, only it burns oi] instead of gasolene. You know how a gasolene engine works, I suppose? First the piston moves out, sucking into the cylinder a charge of mixed gasolene vapor and air; then the piston comes hack, compressing the charge; then a spark ignites the gasolene, exploding it so that it drives the piston out again; and, finally, as the piston moves in once more, it forces out of the cylinder all the gases formed by the burning of the charge; after this, the process is repeated. That is what we call a four-cycle engine, because it takes four strokes of the piston to complete the cycle of operation.. Only one of the four strokes is a working stroke.”
“But what keeps the engine going between strokes?”
“The momentum of the fly-wheel. It is as if you had one pedal on your bicycle, and you made the machine go by giving the pedal a kick every other time around, Usually the engines are built with a number of cylinders, the pistons of which are set to work one after the other, In a four-cylinder machine, there is a kick by one or another of the four pistons at each stroke, The main trouble with the ordinary gasolene engine lies in getting just the right mixture of gasolene and air in the charge, and in igniting it with a spark; but in the Diesel engine, cheap oil is used instead of gasolene, and it is ignited without any spark or flame. How do you suppose?”
We could n’t guess, of course,
“It ’s like this: on the first downward stroke, pure air is drawn into the cylinder, then the piston rises and compresses that air to nearly five hundred pounds per square inch. You know that when you compress air it gets hot?”
“Oh, yes,” I chimed in; “don’t you remember, Will, how the paint was all blistered off the air-compressors at the aqueduct plant?”
“Yes,” continued Mr. Price, “that is right; but there the pressure was very small compared with this. Why, with five hundred pounds to the inch, the temperature amounts to one thousand degrees Fahrenheit; that is, the air gets as hot as iron when it is cherry-red. Into that ‘red hot’ air a spray of oil is forced by a jet of air compressed to about nine hundred pounds per inch, and at once the oil bursts into a flash of flame, kicking the piston out with a powerful stroke, The next stroke clears the cylinder of gases.”
“But why does n’t the jet of air set the oil on fire?”
“Because it comes from a storage tank, and is cooled before it is stored.”
“What I can't understand is why they don’t lose a lot of power when they compress the air in the cylinder,” put in Will.
Mr, Price laughed. “1 knew you would ask that; every one does. The pressure in the cylinder cannot get away. The work the piston does in squeezing that air is not lost, but is all given back to it on the next stroke, and, in addition, there is the pressure of the exploding charge. There is some loss in the compressed air that sprays the oil into the cylinder, because the heat is extracted from it, and it chills the air in the cylinder; but the loss does n’t amount to very much.”
“What ’s the advantage of an oil engine? I should think coal would be cheaper.”
“Do you know how much power is wasted in steam-engines? Ninety per cent.! Why, if they could employ all the energy in the fuel, they would feed the furnaces with coal by the lump instead of by the shovelful. With these oil motors, the wasted energy is cut down to about sixty per cent. The Christian X has two motors, each of twelve. hundred and fifty horse-power, and they use one third of a pound of oil per horse-power, every hour, while a steamship would use more than a pound and a half of coal. They save one hundred and thirty dollars a day. Then there is another advantage: it is a tedious and dirty job to coal a ship, but the oil-motored ship is loaded with fuel by means of a pump, and the oil is stored in the double bottom, where it takes up no cargo space. Then, too, there is no boiler-room, which provides more space for the cargo, and does away with a lot of the crew,”
He was interrupted by a commotion forward. Some one had sighted the Christian X at anchor at quarantine.
“What makes it look so queer?” exclaimed Will, “Why, it has n’t any smoke-stacks!”
“Now, why should it? There is no furnace onboard, and no smoke comes from the engines. That is a feature of the oil motor that would count for a great deal in a war-vessel that did not want to betray its presence to the enemy,”
By the time we reached the Christian X, the health officers had examined the men on board, and we were free to visit the ship, No sooner had I scrambled up to the deck, than some one seized me by the coat-collar, and demanded, in a gruff voice:
“Young man, what are you doing here?”
Without waiting for an answer, he dropped me and grabbed Will, who was right behind me, and dragged him up on the deck.
We both gasped in astonishment—it was Uncle Edward!
“W-w-where did you come from?” stammered Will.
“And w-w-where did you?” mimicked Uncle Edward. “The surprise is mutual. Dr. McGreggor and I are about the only passengers on board. We have been studying the motor engines all the way across, and they have behaved beautifully. But how in the world did you happen aboard?”
While we were in the midst of our explanations, Uncle Edward caught sight of his partner.
“Oh, McGreggor,” he called, “see who ’s here. These are the two chaps you thought would go to the dogs if they were turned loose in New York. Here they are, keenly interested in Diesel engines, and during the last few months they have been through almost everything of any engineering importance, I hear. You must admit that my confidence in these youngsters was not misplaced.”
“Wait a bit; let me cross-examine them,” returned Dr. McGreggor. “How much of that one thousand dollars is left?”
“Quite a little,” said Will, pulling out his checkbook, which showed a balance of about $480.
“Some of it was spent at Coney Island?”
“Oh, yes, some; I could n't say how much, You know, we have had a very hot summer.”
“What else have you seen?”
“Bridge-building, foundations, the aqueduct—”
“Hold on, now; what evidence have I of all this?”
“Our diary. Jim is the scribe, you know. He has an account of everything of any importance. He took notes as we went along, and then entered them in the diary at night.”
“Where is your note-book, Jim?” asked Dr. McGregor, sternly.
I handed him the book, apologizing for its scrawly condition. He looked at it perfunctorily at first, then an item caught his attention, and he began to examine the notes intently.
“Well?” interrupted Uncle Edward, after we had waited for several minutes.
“Most interesting,” muitered Dr. McGreggor; “most interesting. Young gentlemen, I have no case, and I shall direct the jury to bring in a verdict in your favor.”
“Hurray!” shouted Uncle Edward, patting Will on the back; “you have the right stuff in you; I knew you would n’t fail me.” Dr. McGreggor shook his head, and grunted something as Uncle Edward continued, “Will, I am going to put you through a stiff course in college, and make an engineer of you.”
Will was radiant.
Then a most tnexpected thing happened. Dr. McGreggor spoke up, “Jim is going through college, too, and I am going to meet his expenses.”
I was overwhelmed. A college course for me! How I had longed for it! How impossible it seemed with Father in his present straitened circumstances! How it had hurt to think of Will’s going to college while I stayed at home; for I felt certain all along that his Uncle Edward would look after him. I don’t know that I comported myself very creditably, but I stammered out some a of thanks—not a thousandth part of what I felt.
“I was planning to take care of Jim, too,” said Uncle Edward, But Dr. McGreggor insisted on bearing the expenses himself. After he and Uncle Edward had talked it over at some length, it was finally conceded that Dr. McGreggor should see me through college, provided my parents did not object.
“Hello, we are under way again,” exclaimed Uncle Edward, “we had better run below, or the ship will be docked before you have a chance to sre the engines running.”
Of what we saw down in the engine-room I have only the vaguest impression. The picture on a preceding page will tell the story better than I can. My eyes could not take in very much, for my mind was up in the clouds somewhere.
THE END.