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This was easily effected by redistributing the seats and arranging the scholars according to classes, so that a mischievous fellow, charged full of the rebellious imponderable, should find himself between two non-conductors, in the shape of small boys of studious habits. It was managed quietly enough, in such a plausible sort of way that its motive was not thought of.

"The gymnotus sent from Surinam to M. Norderling, at Stockholm, lived more than four months in a state of perfect health. It was twenty-seven inches long; and the shocks it gave were so violent, especially in the open air, that I found scarcely any means of protecting myself by non-conductors, in transporting the fish from one place to another.

Rugs are non-conductors. Get one, that I may stand on it here, and you, too. The skies blacken it is dusk at noon. Hark! the rug, the rug!" I gave him one; while the hooded mountains seemed closing and tumbling into the cottage. "And now, since our being dumb will not help us," said I, resuming my place, "let me hear your precautions in traveling during thunder-storms."

It is independent of passes or gestures; it has no relation to any fluid emanating from the operator; it has no relation to his will, or to any influence which he exercises upon inanimate objects; distance does not affect it, nor proximity, nor the intervention of any conductors or non-conductors, whether silk or glass or stone, or even a brick wall.

No doubt the process is an extremely slow one. The mighty reservoirs of internal heat are covered by vast layers of rock, which are such excellent non-conductors that they offer every possible impediment to the leakage of heat from the interior to the surface.

"Well," began Robin, with a hypocritical sigh of despair, "you must know that everything in nature is more or less a conductor of electricity, but some things conduct it so well such as copper and iron that they are called conductors, and some things such as glass and earthenware conduct it so very badly that they scarcely conduct it at all, and are called non-conductors. D'ee see?"

There is always a guard of two men at each gate, who walk up and down with guns upon their shoulders. While attempting to give a brief description of this building, I may as well say that it is constructed with non-conductors between the walls, so that the ringing of a bell, or the loudest shriek, could not be heard from one room to the other.

The next step was to find that all substances were not alike in a power to conduct a current; i.e., that there were "conductors" and "non-conductors," and all varying grades and powers between. The next discovery was that there were, as was then imagined, several kinds of electricity.

Oh no! but what dull ache is this in that obscurely sensitive region, somewhere below the heart, where the nervous centre called the semilunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself until a great grief or a mastering anxiety reaches it through all the non-conductors which isolate it from ordinary impressions?

There were probably a dozen very young men in the room waiting to rise with their partners at a signal for dancing; and these could not be calculated upon to take an initiative, or follow one as ladies, poor slaves! will do when the electric hostess rustles. The men present were non-conductors.