I had been reading a lot of "Letters to the _Times_." That may account
for any little confusion in the details of the subsequent events.
My interlocutor was tall and thin, and looming up lanky against a dusky
sky, reminded me equally of an attenuated M.P., a phantom
telegraph-pole, and PETER SCHLEMIL, the Shadowless Man.
"TYNDALL is quite right," murmured he.
"Glad to hear it," said I, earnestly. "I had been thinking lately that
the distinguished _savant_ was going decidedly wrong."
"Ah! he understands _me!_" sighed the Spectre.
It was more than _I_ did; and I said so.
"Who and what are you, anyhow?" I inquired.
The lines of Long-thin-and-hungry seemed to shift and reshape.
"Ah!" came his voice, the same yet not the same, "elevation does not
always give coolness, and one may be torrid and tempestuous even among
the Alps."
Somehow this statement, though a truism, did not seem to fit on to
previous remarks.
"I was once said to be 'Up in a balloon,'" continued Proteus (now
looking rather like the Ancient Mariner,) "long and lean and brown, but
letters written to the _Times_ even from the utmost height lately
attained by the French Aëronauts--to say nothing of the top of the
tallest Lightning Conductor--would, I fear, be hot and ill-balanced.
Look at Mr. H. O. ARNOLD-FOSTER!"
"Perhaps--in a sense--we _are_ Lightning Conductors, you know," pursued
my companion.
"As how?" I asked vaguely.
"Well we attract, and carry off harmlessly--it doesn't hurt us you
see--the accumulated political electricity, which otherwise might rend
and rive the State about which these Angry Amateurs are so passionately
anxious."