The Idiot

n from a scientific weekly he had been reading to a towering pile of buckwheat cakes that Mary had just brought i

ry!" said Mr

e 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

ITSELF WIL

dvance in invention, eh?"

" queried

ld enable man to debase nature to the le

n 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 off

r 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 quarre

g 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 t

ved. It is almost within the range of possibilities that some man may yet invent a buckwheat cake that will sa

ou request the cook hereafter to prepare individual cakes for us

ddles, 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 upo

ng of heraldry," said the p

everything," said the

ow everything about somet

r, dryly, "that a little rampant jackass

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 ba

ES TO B

" queried

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, wh

penetrate to the finality,

-way there," returned the Idiot. "Finally he will tackle some eleme

merity to take liberties with elementary principles was quite within reason, man being an animal of rare

ned once or twice alr

og, with a show of interest. "Up

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 t

al in what you say,"

ng it. The last three dozen cakes have got cold as ice whi

t 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

h lot of cakes; and the guests, after eating them, adjourned to their various d