The Battery and the Boiler - Robert Michael Ballantyne (an ebook reader .txt) 📗

dear fellow, it is my fate. I must bow to it. And I know that if I were to wait till I see her again, all my courage would have oozed away--"

"But I don't intend that you shall wait, Robin," interrupted Sam. "You need not go on talking so selfishly about yourself. You must consider the girl. I'm not going to stand by and see injustice done to _her_. You have paid _marked_ attention to her, and are bound in honour to lay yourself at her feet, even at the risk of a refusal."

"But how, Sam? I tell you if I wait--"

"Then don't wait,--telegraph."

Robin gazed at his friend in stupefied amazement. "What! make a proposal of marriage by telegraph?"

"Even so, Robin. You began life with electricity, so it is quite in keeping that you should begin a new departure in life with it."

Sam rose, sought for paper, and with pencil wrote as follows:--"From Mr R. Wright, London, to Miss Letta Langley, --- Hotel, Oban.--I can stand it no longer. May I come to see you?"

Presenting this to his friend, Sam said, "May I despatch it?"

Robin nodded, smiled, and looked foolish.

An hour later Mrs Langley, sitting beside her daughter, took up a pen, and wrote as follows:--

"From Miss Letta Langley, Oban, to R. Wright, London.--Yes."

Presenting this to her daughter, she said. "May I send it?"

Letta once more covered her face with her hands, and blushed.

Thus it came to pass that our hero's fate in life, as well as his career, was decided by the electric telegraph.

But the best of it was that Robin _did_ go to India after all--as if to do despite to his friends, who had said he must not go. Moreover, he took Letta with him, and he hunted many a day through the jungles of that land in company with his friend Redpath, and his henchman Flinn. And, long afterwards, he returned to England, a sturdy middle-aged man, with a wife whose beauty was unabated because it consisted, chiefly, in that love of heart to God and man which lends never-fading loveliness to the human countenance.

Awaiting them at home was a troop of little ones--the first home-instalment of a troop of lesser ones who accompanied the parent stems. All of these, besides being gifted with galvanic energy and flashing eyes, were impressed with the strong conviction, strange to say, that batteries, boilers, and submarine cables, were the most important things in the whole world, and the only subjects worth being played at by reasonable human children.

THE END.
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Publication Date: 07-02-2010

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