all the
other light seem dim and lifeless. Under its focus the golden caravels
and the draped figures showed strange contrasts of chalky pallor and
deep shade. Only a moment later a second bar of light leaped out from
a sky-high nook of the Manufactures building and swept the surface of
the basin. It struck a moving gondola, and in a flash showed the gay
Venetians bending to their long oars, the bright colors of the boat
and the muffled forms of the passengers.

Johnny had left the others absorbed in their trance of delight. He
sought other sights. Directly he came to the Electricity building, with
its marvels of light. It burst on his childish mind, seeking for
novelties, as greater than the scenes outside. It was something that
Fanny and Uncle and Aunt must see. He ran in the greatest haste to bring
them. When they came in, Johnny showed them where to sit to see the
great illumination in the center of the building. It was then quite dark
about them, but Johnny knew the marvelous sight he had said was there
would soon appear.

Four rows of colored bulbs containing incandescent lights and placed on
zig-zag frame works forty feet long in different directions are about a
pillar around which are twined strings of two thousand electric bulbs of
red, white and blue. The pillar is covered with bits of reflecting
colored glass, thus making a magic intermingling of lights that almost
rival the lightning in startling brilliancy and produce a pillar of fire
scarcely surpassed even by that one which led the Israelites across the
sea.

When the illumination came the weird ingenuity of the electric magicians
struck Aunt Sarah with a sublimity almost more than she could endure. As
the flashes of light struck out about the pillar and the ball of fire
fell as if dropped from some creating hand she screamed, "O my God, what
blasphemy is this that men have achieved. Can they snatch the fire from
heaven and make the lightening a plaything?"

She sank upon a chair and gazed stupefied for some minutes at the awful
scene. Then as they passed on she said, "I have seen the wonderful
machinery great and small. I have seen the old relics which they say are
the remains of men's hopes long gone by, but when man can take the light
that comes out from the storms and put it up for show, it seems to me
that I am seeing forbidden things and that the skill of men has gone too
far."

[Illustration: "The light shot across the sky."]

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