POLITICAL ECONOMY. 23 



[Here I was interrupted again, and required to go down and confer further with 

 that lightning-rod man. I hurried off, boiling and surging with prodigious thoughts 

 wombed in words of such majesty that each one of them was in itself a straggling 

 procession of syllables that might be fifteen minutes passing a given point, and once 

 more I confronted him — he so calm and sweet, I so hot and frenzied. He was 

 standing in the contemplative attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on 

 my infant tuberose, and the other among my pansies, his hands on his hips, his 

 hat-brim tilted forward, one eye'shut and the other gazing critically and admiringly 

 in the direction of my principal chimney. He said now there was a state of things 

 to make a man glad to be alive ; and added, " I leave it X.o you if you ever saw any- 

 thing more deliriously picturesque than eight lightning-rods on one chimney.?" I 

 said I had no present recollection of anything that transcended it. He said that 

 in his opinion nothing on earth but Niagara Falls was superior to it in the way of 

 natural scenery. All that was needed now, he verily believed, to make my house a 

 perfect balm to the eye, was to kind of touch up the other chimneys a little, and 

 thus "add to the generous coup d'ceil a soothing uniformity of achievement which 

 would allay the excitement naturally consequent upon the first coup d'etat." I 

 asked him if he learned to talk out of a book, and if I could borrow it anywhere ? 

 He smiled pleasantly, and said that his manner of speaking was not taught in books, 

 and that nothing but familiarity witli lightning could enable a man to handle his 

 conversational style with impunity. He then figured up an estimate, and said that 

 about eight more rods scattered about my roof would about fix me right, and he 

 guessed five hundred feet of stuff would do it ; and added that the first eight had 

 got a little the start of him, so to speak, and used up a mere trifle of material more 

 than he had calculated on— ahundred feet or along there. I said I was in a dreadful 

 hurry, and I wished we could get this business permanently mapped out, so that I 

 could go on with my work. He said, " I could have put up those eight rods, and 

 marched off about my business — some men would have done it. But no : I said to 

 myself, this man is a stranger to me, and I will die before I'll wrong him; there 

 ain't lightning-rods enough on that house, and for one I'll never stir out of my 

 tracks till I've done as I would be done by, and told him so. Stranger, my duty 

 is accomplished ; if the recalcitrant and dephlogistic messenger of heaven strikes 



