He was morbidly
curious to see some light at the end of the passage, as though
thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to fall into King's
arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left in life.
Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing so
little when others knew so much, crushed out hope.
He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk,
idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see
whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and oldest
toy he knew was the child's magnet, with which he had played
since babyhood, the most familiar of puzzles. He covered his desk
with magnets, and mapped out their lines of force by compass.
Then he read all the books he could find, and tried in vain to
makes his lines of force agree with theirs. The books confounded
him. He could not credit his own understanding. Here was
literally the most concrete fact in nature, next to gravitation
which it defied; a force which must have radiated lines of energy
without stop, since time began, if not longer, and which might
probably go on radiating after the sun should fall into the
earth, since no one knew why -- or how -- or what it radiated --
or even whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the earliest known of
all natural forces after the solar energies, it seemed to have
suggested no idea to any one until some mariner bethought himself
that it might serve for a pointer.
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