The Lightning Keeper by Starling Lawrence

where the senator takes his morning exercise a-rowing in his sleek scull with his bulldog, Sousa, perched on the bow. The senator will shake any man’s hand, but there is a particular tone in the cordiality he extends to the ironmaster: so much difficult history comprised in that clasp, to say nothing of the outstanding mortgages, and for the most part our Montague and our Capulet maintain a polite, wary distance. I will say this, however, and trust it will not be received as any vulgar tale-carrying but rather as a thread in the warp of our history: the senator, although he is a lifelong bachelor and a man not so distant in years from the ironmaster himself, has a particular care for the daughter, Miss Harriet Bigelow, a graceful and accomplished young woman who, in addition to her discreet competence in the accounting and disbursements of the Bigelow Iron Company, is a musician of note and a principal in the affairs of the local chapter of the Temperance Union.
    In a very correct and unobtrusive way, the senator has become her patron in the matters of nearest concern to her: he has hosted a fund-raising gala in the Manor, as his house is called, for the Temperance Union, and has forbidden any alcoholic beverage to be served at his political gatherings; his pew in the Congregational Church, which affords a convenient, oblique view of the Bigelows’, is in regular use when the senator is not attending to affairs in Washington, and he has requested of her the favor of a needlepoint cover for that little stool whereon he kneels; he has organized more than one musical soirée at the Manor, where Miss Bigelow charms the audience with her voice and her mastery of the piano, and where afterward the senator exerts himself in a vigorous reel with that young woman as his partner, to the applause of all present; and, of course, there are those private audiences in his office in the bank, when the mortgage papers are withdrawn from their iron box to be shuffled, discussed, and put away again with smiles on both sides.
    The ironmaster cannot be altogether ignorant of Fowler Truscott’s attentions to his daughter, but as the senator has not announced himself as her suitor, he need not acknowledge them in any way. Truscott does not call upon Miss Bigelow at home, but it is public knowledge that in order to further her amateur musical interests he had delivered to her a console harmonium, which sits in the front parlor of the house. The ironmaster, owing to his impairment, cannot actually hear much save for the deepest tones of the Bach, but he smiles at her when she plays, for her mother, too, was fond of music. And the mahogany cabinet of the instrument bears a curious mark that no amount of turpentine or beeswax can altogether disguise. To humor his daughter, the ironmaster will kneel to the harmonium and lay his teeth just there upon the corner of the case, receiving in this way the vibrations and some intimation of those now vanished higher registers. Miss Bigelow has read an article in the Chautauqua Journal about Mr. Edison, that man of electrical genius and keen musical interests who suffers from thesame defect of hearing, but who nonetheless has given the world his astonishing device, the phonograph, and who monitors the quality of those recordings, even judges the relative merits of vocal artists according to the impression received thus, through his teeth. “Can you hear it, Papa?” she will say to him. In truth, he cannot, but he would not dream of disappointing her in this matter. It is one definition of human kindliness that a man must suffer such things in silence for the sake of another rather than speak his mind frankly, and the ironmaster, of course, has every reason to perceive virtue in silence.
    Our balloon, buoyed these moments by the giddying thermals of Great Mountain, now descends, and where but a while ago we held that lofty and foreshortening view of the town and its sad history, now we come