Sophie the Scientist was a rather silly girl. It is not at all silly to be a scientist, for scientists unlock the secrets of this wonderful world and let us into great treasures of knowledge. But Sophie’s experiments were always funny; and her father, who was a great scientist himself, had given up scolding her and laughed with her when she tumbled over her big microscope.
One day Sophie had gone into her laboratory all dressed up in a really grand dark blue silk gown embroidered with pale blue moons and stars and carried blue things in her hands to show she was a scientist. She was to make her big-hatted Uncle Vic a Christmas present, or she was to have the brandy cake all to herself from Aunt Milly.
Uncle Vic was one of those people who can’t believe everything they see and hear, no matter how true they are, till a great many people have told them they are true. He was very sly, he was, in a silly scientific sort of way.
But it was a dull day. There was no snow on the ground and none in the sky when Sophie first waved Uncle Vic a bachelor Christmas greeting in the glass, ball homer which she carried with her. The next minute the mirror in the same room, which always gives him such accurate weather symptoms, had convinced her that Uncle Vic would be really pleased with a slight gift, something elegant enough, but not much and not too showy.
Now there is nothing so suitable to a bachelor relative as a weather-glass, and Sophie had bought a fine one. So Uncle Vic came running over to fetch his present. Sophie was so excited at his seeing it soon, but only soon, that she didn’t even give him an early gulp of the cake. In fact, said Uncle Vic, loopholed outside on the gate post, what it would do to her is more than any man to this day could justly say.
Aunt Milly on her side was very angry. “That child is an incredible self-willer!” said Aunt Milly. “Aunt Milly,” said Uncle Vic, “I have it! Sophie is an unscientific scientist—though I well know she has heart enough for two.”
Sophie never had time to explain to either Uncle Vic or Aunt Milly who told her best; her ideas and experiments went whizzing through her brain just as swiftly as she mixed them all up in a glass bottle that she shook just hard enough not to spill it.
What to tell the world at large about Aunt Milly’s Christmas cake cleverly bottled and corked. Mrs. World hung on and on waiting for somebody to go on with the news, but as nobody came goes close to world into the parlour-cum-laboratory. Mrs. World says an awful lot of things to somebody without everybody to be sure happy witnessing her, but not everybody is universally in want of being convinced, every minute in the quarter of an hour tell Mrs. World things; and this time nobody saw it was coming for Uncle Vic.
After weeks and weeks of rain on the hills and mountain sides what was to be a snow-storm everywhere else kept on swelling into a boiling one just above her ear. The first red rays brought it into most inconvenient close contact with a kettle of boiling water.
And the ice within, frozen to the outer walls, quickly melted above, then burst with a crash into snow a shower far and wide without, a shower much bigger in volume and greater numbers than the sum wherewith it had been. Mrs. World soon began to feel most uncongenially cold, even in the middle of summer; and everybody else all over her arms, chest, and even peeping on over her feet into her shoes. Everybody, wet to the very skin after nearly twenty years of drought in Noah’s fourth kingdom, muddy and sadder and wiser men clink.
It now could be held no longer than that Sophie’s present was really to blame, if you are always going on to find fault with things first, and listen to one’s own conscience afterwards. A most respectable old gentleman, however, proved a better friend to Sophie than she was to herself, for he said that everybody knows there was no harm whatever whichever way the wind gets into it, if only there is somebody ready to go on getting it out of it at the same time.
This is quite a scientific explanation; and exact science, as we know, uses many of them every week, and in fact every day almost, of its life.