when the war is over, people are going to be hungry. I am glad that my brother has his mind set on farming. I hope he will be a very happy farmer, and that his sons will grow up to be farmers. It seems to me that the world needs farmers a good deal more than it needs chemists and electricians. Horatio says that there is enough electricity in the air over any farm to run all the farm machinery. I am not very fond of electricity, because I have seen it strike barns full of green hay, but if Horatio wishes to use it to run his machinery, I have no objection.

“And now the time has come to say good-by. We are very grateful to you, our teachers, for giving us such a good time, and we shall try to remember what you have taught us. And to you, our young friends who come after us, we say, love your star. Love the earth, because it is very beautiful, and try to love all of it. Of course you can’t possibly love it all as much as you love the United States of America, and you can’t love that wild foreign city called Chicago as much as you love Warrenville, but you can practice loving the earth in general. It looks like white lightning, but it isn’t really any such dreadful thing. It is our home.”

Chapter 6. Carbon

At commencement time Marvin’s father happened to be in South America, but his mother came on to New Haven, where she met not only Mrs. Hogg and Jimmy, but also Gratia. Her son surprised her by refusing to take a vacation. She therefore returned with him to New York, and saw him settled.

Before she left him she had learned, in the gentle way of mothers, what he had said to Kate Coggeshall, and had given him her check that he might buy a car. She knew him for what he was, masculine, able, and intermittent, and saw that friendship with Gratia would go far to keep him straight.

But he did not soon spend the check. He plunged into the study of carbon, especially the forms that need to be more perfectly carbonized to yield smokeless fuel.

Great is carbon, and deep as the shining sea, and a man may plunge into it without going far. It is only the sixth chapter of electricity, but it holds the patterns of human history. It is the most remarkable of all the elements that unite to make a human body.

To conceive of some bodily actions as electric is not difficult. When you lose your temper and hit a man, the very crack of the bones sounds like a crack of lightning. When you discharge a kiss that you never meant to discharge, it 

 Prev. P 22/206 next