Rudyard Kipling - With The Night Mail

"Pray for me," he says upon the eve of each of his excursions, and returning, with an equal simplicity, he renders thanks "after supper in the little room where he kept his barometers."

To the last Lavalle was a Catholic of the old school, accepting—he who had looked into the very heart of the lightnings—the dogmas of papal infallibility, of absolution, of confession—of relics great and small. Marvellous—enviable contradiction!

The completion of the Tellurionical Records closed what Lavalle himself was pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever–shifting cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death–bed in the utmost ether of the upper atmosphere—each one of the Isoconical Tellurions—Lavalle's Curves, as we call them to–day. He had disentangled the nodes of their intersections, assigning to each its regulated period of flux and reflux. Thus equipped, he summons Herrera and Tinsley, his pupils, to the final demonstration as calmly as though he were ordering his flighter for some midday journey to Marseilles.

"I have proved my thesis," he writes. "It remains now only that you should witness the proof. We go to Manila to–morrow. A cyclone will form off the Pescadores S. 17 E. in four days, and will reach its maximum intensity in twenty–seven hours after inception. It is there I will show you the Truth."

A letter heretofore unpublished from Herrera to Madame Lavalle tells us how the Master's prophecy was verified.

( To be continued .)