"The progress of invention in this country has been very remarkable,"
said Mr. Pedagog, as he turned his attention from a scientific weekly he
had been reading to a towering pile of buckwheat cakes that Mary had just
brought in. "An Englishman has just discovered a means by which a ship in
distress at sea can write for help on the clouds."
"Extraordinary!" said Mr. Whitechoker.
"It might be more so," observed the Idiot, coaxing the platterful of
cakes out of the School-Master's reach by a dexterous movement of his
hand. "And it will be more so some day. The time is coming when the
moon itself will be used by some enterprising American to advertise his
soap business. I haven't any doubt that the next fifty years will develop
a stereopticon by means of which a picture of a certain brand of cigar
may be projected through space until it seems to be held between the
teeth of the man in the moon, with a printed legend below it stating
that this is _Tooforfivers Best, Rolled from Hand-made Tobacco, Warranted
not to Crock or Fade, and for sale by All Tobacconists at Eighteen for a
Dime_."
[Illustration: "THE MOON ITSELF WILL BE USED"]
"You would call that an advance in invention, eh?" asked the
School-Master.
"Why not?" queried the Idiot.
"Do you consider the invention which would enable man to debase nature to
the level of an advertising medium an advance?"
"I should not consider the use of the moon for the dissemination of good
news a debasement. If the cigars were good--and I have no doubt that some
one will yet invent a cheap cigar that is good--it would benefit the
human race to be acquainted with that fact. I think sometimes that the
advertisements in the newspapers and the periodicals of the day are of
more value to the public than the reading-matter, so-called, that stands
next to them. I don't see why you should sneer at advertising. I should
never have known you, for instance, Mr. Pedagog, had it not been for Mrs.
Pedagog's advertisement offering board and lodging to single gentlemen
for a consideration. Nor would you have met Mrs. Smithers, now your
estimable wife, yourself, had it not been for that advertisement. Why,
then, do you sneer at the ladder upon which you have in a sense climbed
to your present happiness? You are ungrateful."
"How you do ramify!" said Mr. Pedagog. "I believe there is no subject in
the world which you cannot connect in some way or another with every
other subject in the world. A discussion of the merits of Shakespeare's
sonnets could be turned by your dexterous tongue in five minutes into a
quarrel over the comparative merits of cider and cod-liver oil as
beverages, with you, the chances are, the advocate of cod-liver oil as
a steady drink."
"Well, I must say," said the Idiot, with a smile, "it has been my
experience that cod-liver oil is steadier than cider. The cod-liver
oils I have had the pleasure of absorbing have been evenly vile, while
the ciders that I have drank have been of a variety of goodness, badness,
and indifferentness which has brought me to the point where I never touch
it. But to return to inventions, since you desire to limit our discussion
to a single subject, I think it is about the most interesting field of
speculation imaginable."
"There you are right," said Mr. Pedagog, approvingly. "There is
absolutely no limit to the possibilities involved. It is almost within
the range of possibilities that some man may yet invent a buckwheat cake
that will satisfy your abnormal craving for that delicacy, which the
present total output of this table seems unable to do."
Here Mr. Pedagog turned to his wife, and added: "My dear, will you
request the cook hereafter to prepare individual cakes for us? The Idiot
has so far monopolized all that have as yet appeared."
"It appears to me," said the Idiot at this point, "that _you_ are the
ramifier, Mr. Pedagog. Nevertheless, ramify as much as you please. I can
follow you--at a safe distance, of course--in the discussion of anything,
from Edison to flapjacks. I think your suggestion regarding individual
cakes is a good one. We might all have separate griddles, upon which
Gladys, the cook, can prepare them, and on these griddles might be cast
in bold relief the crest of each member of this household, so that every
man's cake should, by an easy process in the making, come off the fire
indelibly engraved with the evidence of its destiny. Mr. Pedagog's iron,
for instance, might have upon it a school-book rampant, or a large head
in the same condition. Mr. Whitechoker's cake-mark might be a pulpit
rampant, based upon a vestryman dormant. The Doctor might have a lozengy
shield with a suitable tincture, while my genial friend who occasionally
imbibes could have a barry shield surmounted by a small effigy of
Gambrinus."
"You appear to know something of heraldry," said the poet, with a look of
surprise.
"I know something of everything," said the Idiot, complacently.
"It's a pity you don't know everything about something," sneered the
Doctor.
"I would suggest," said the School-Master, dryly, "that a little rampant
jackass would make a good crest for your cakes."
"That's a very good idea," said the Idiot. "I do not know but that a
jackass rampant would be about as comprehensive of my virtues as anything
I might select. The jackass is a combination of all the best qualities.
He is determined. He minds his own business. He doesn't indulge in
flippant conversation. He is useful. Has no vices, never pretends to be
anything but a jackass, and most respectfully declines to be ridden by
Tom, Dick, and Harry. I accept the suggestion of Mr. Pedagog with thanks.
But we are still ramifying. Let us get back to inventions. Now I fully
believe that the time is coming when some inventive genius will devise a
method whereby intellect can be given to those who haven't any. I believe
that the time is coming when the secrets of the universe will be yielded
up to man by nature."
[Illustration: "DECLINES TO BE RIDDEN"]
"And then?" queried Mr. Brief.
"Then some man will try to improve on the secrets of the universe. He
will try to invent an apparatus by means of which the rotation of the
world may be made faster or slower, according to his will. If he has but
one day, for instance, in which to do a stated piece of work, and he
needs two, he will put on some patent brake and slow the world up until
the distance travelled in one hour shall be reduced one-half, so that one
hour under the old system will be equivalent to two; or if he is
anticipating some joy, some diversion in the future, the same smart
person will find a way to increase the speed of the earth so that the
hours will be like minutes. Then he'll begin fooling with gravitation,
and he will discover a new-fashioned lodestone, which can be carried in
one's hat to counter-act the influence of the centre of gravity when one
falls out of a window or off a precipice, the result of which will be
that the person who falls off one of these high places will drop down
slowly, and not with the rapidity which at the present day is responsible
for the dreadful outcome of accidents of that sort. Then, finally--"
"You pretend to be able to penetrate to the finality, do you?" asked the
Clergyman.
"Why not? It is as easy to imagine the finality as it is to go half-way
there," returned the Idiot. "Finally he will tackle some elementary
principle of nature, and he'll blow the world to smithereens."
There was silence at the table. This at least seemed to be a tenable
theory. That man should have the temerity to take liberties with
elementary principles was quite within reason, man being an animal of
rare conceit, and that the result would bring about destruction was not
at all at variance with probability.
"I believe it's happened once or twice already," said the Idiot.
"Do you really?" asked Mr. Pedagog, with a show of interest. "Upon what
do you base this belief?"
"Well, take Africa," said the Idiot. "Take North America. What do we
find? We find in the sands of the Sahara a great statue, which we call
the Sphinx, and about which we know nothing, except that it is there and
that it keeps its mouth shut. We find marvellous creations in engineering
that to-day surpass anything that we can do. The Sphinx, when discovered,
was covered by sand. Now I believe that at one time there were people
much further advanced in science than ourselves, who made these wonderful
things, who knew how to do things that we don't even dream of doing, and
I believe that they, like this creature I have predicted, got fooling
with the centre of gravity, and that the world slipped its moorings for a
period of time, during which time it tumbled topsy-turvey into space, and
that banks and banks of sand and water and ice thrown out of position
simply swept on and over the whole surface of the globe continuously
until the earth got into the grip of the rest of the universe once more
and started along in a new orbit. We know that where we are high and dry
to-day the ocean must once have rolled. We know that where the world is
now all sunshine and flowers great glaciers stood. What caused all this
change? Nothing else, in my judgment, than the monkeying of man with the
forces of nature. The poles changed, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit
that, if the north pole were ever found and could be thawed out, we
should find embedded in that great sea of ice evidences of a former
civilization, just as in the Saharan waste evidences of the same thing
have been found. I know of a place out West that is literally strewn with
oyster-shells, and yet no man living has the slightest idea how they came
there. It may have been the Massachusetts Bay of a pre-historic time, for
all we know. It may have been an antediluvian Coney Island, for all the
world knows. Who shall say that this little upset of mine found here an
oyster-bed, shook all the oysters out of their bed into space, and left
their clothes high and dry in a locality which, but for those garments,
would seem never to have known the oyster in his prime? Off in
Westchester County, on the top of a high hill, lies a rock, and in the
uppermost portion of that rock is a so-called pot-hole, made by nothing
else than the dropping of water of a brook and the swirling of pebbles
therein. It is now beyond the reach of anything in the shape of water
save that which falls from the heavens. It is certain that this pot-hole
was never made by a boy with a watering-pot, by a hired man with a hose,
by a workman with a drill, or by any rain-storm that ever fell in
Westchester County. There must at some time or another have been a
stream there; and as streams do not flow uphill and bore pot-holes on
mountain-tops, there must have been a valley there. Some great cataclysm
took place. For that cataclysm nature must be held responsible mainly.
But what prompted nature to raise hob with Westchester County millions of
years ago, and to let it sleep like Rip Van Winkle ever since? Nature
isn't a freak. She is depicted as a woman, but in spite of that she is
not whimsical. She does not act upon impulses. There must have been some
cause for her behavior in turning valleys into hills, in transforming
huge cities into wastes of sand, and oyster-beds into shell quarries; and
it is my belief that man was the contributing cause. He tapped the earth
for natural gas; he bored in and he bored out, and he bored nature to
death, and then nature rose up and smote him and his cities and his
oyster-beds, and she'll do it again unless we go slow."
"There is a great deal in what you say," said Mr. Whitechoker.
"Very true," said Mrs. Pedagog. "But I wish he'd stop saying it. The last
three dozen cakes have got cold as ice while he was talking, and I can't
afford such reckless waste."
"Nor we, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, with a pleasant smile; "for, as I
was saying to the Bibliomaniac this morning, your buckwheat cakes are, to
my mind, the very highest development of our modern civilization, and to
have even one of them wasted seems to me to be a crime against Nature
herself, for which a second, third, or fourth shaking up of this earth
would be an inadequate punishment."
This remark so pleased Mrs. Pedagog that she ordered the cook to send up
a fresh lot of cakes; and the guests, after eating them, adjourned to
their various duties with light hearts, and digestions occupied with work
of great importance.