he steeple four or five times, wrapping my assistant in
bluish-white flame. Then it took a long jump straight down Wall Street,
smashed a flagpole to slivers, and vanished. Say, there are things about
lightning I've never heard explained. I know of a steeple-climber, for
instance, who was killed by lightning--it must have been lightning,
although no one saw it strike. There were two of them working on a
scaffolding when a thunder-storm came up, and this man's partner started
for the ground, as climbers with any sense always do. But this fellow
was lazy or out of sorts or something, and said he wouldn't go down,
he'd stay on the steeple until the storm was over. And he did stay
there, without getting any harm, so far as anybody on the ground could
see, except a wetting. Just the same, when his partner went up again, he
found him stretched out on the scaffolding, dead."

"Frightened to death?" I suggested.

[Illustration: AT THE TOP OF ST. PAUL'S, NEW YORK.]

Merrill shook his head. "No, they said it was lightning; but it's
queer how lightning could kill a man without being seen, isn't it?"

Then Merrill gave an experience of his own with a thunderbolt. It was
during this same busy summer of 1900, while he and his partner were
scraping the great steel smoke-stack that rises from ground to roof
along one side of the American Tract Society Building, that towering
structure which looks down with contempt, no doubt, upon ordinary church
steeples.

"We were in our saddles," Merrill explained, "swung down about two
thirds of the smoke-stack's length, when some black clouds warned us of
danger, and we hauled ourselves up to the roof. My partner, Walter
Tyghe, got off his saddle and stood there where my wife was waiting (she
often goes to climbing-jobs with me--she's less anxious when she can
watch me); but I thought the storm was passing over, and kept on
scraping, sort of half resting on the cornice, half on my saddle.
Suddenly a bolt shot down from a little pink cloud just overhead, and
splintered a big flagpole I had just put halyards on, and then jumped
past us all so close that it knocked Walter over, and made me sick and
giddy so that I fell back limp on my saddle-board, and swung there
helpless until my wife pulled the trip-rope that opens the lock-block
and drew me in from the edge. That's not the first time she's been on
deck at the right minute. Once she came up a steeple to tell me
something, and found the haulin