The Inventions of the Idiot

ar's H

an inventive genius. Why don't you invent an easy way to make a fortune? The

tle labor, comparatively speaking. You, for instance, probably work harder over a yard of poetry that brings you in t

t is ideas that count rathe

ly half an idea. It isn't idea so much as nerve that counts. The man who builds railroads doesn't advance any particular idea, but he shows lots of nerve, and it is nerve t

erve in writing?" que

a majority of the writers of to-day, and wouldn't have the grit to strike out in a new line of my own. Men say, and perhaps very properly, this is the thing that has succeeded in the past. I'll do this. Something else that appears alluring enough in the abstract has never been done, and for that reason I won't do it. There have been clever men before me, men clever enough to think of this something that I fondly imagine is original, and they haven't done it. Doubtless they refrained from doing it for good and sufficient reasons, and I am not going to be fool enough to set my judgment up against theirs. In other words, I lack the nerve to go ahead and write as I feel. I prefer to study past successe

of certainty, the truth of your premises, and it must be admitted that your conclusions are based properly upon those premises, and yet you

ou have something, and having something promotes caution and tends to destroy nerve. As a beggar you have ever

ss that you don't. How would you show nerve as a beggar? Would you strive to enforce your demands and degenerate into a

e's office and threaten to blow him to pieces if he did

a placard saying that I was by nature too lazy to work, too fond of life to starve, too poor to live, and too honest to steal, and would be placed in affluence if every man and woman who saw that sign would send me ten cents a week in two-cent postage-stamps for five weeks running, I should receive enough money to enable me to live at the most expensive hotel in town during that period. By living at that hotel and paying my bills regularly I could get credit enough to set myself up in business, and wit

id the Bibliomaniac. "I have no doubt that th

ll men, as well as a boon to the beggars. That mendicancy is a profession to-day there is no

ndly. "I intended to call it Mendicancy Made Easy, or the

think," said the Poet, "would be that your be

ooks by helping themselves to the suburbanites' copies as they do to chickens, fire-wood, and pies put out to cool. As for the beggars, I'd have it put into their hands by the people they beg from. When a man comes up to a wayfarer, for instance, and

r would read it, do you?

es of these people and collect their incomes in a more business-like and less undignified fashion. Added to this would be two lists, one for tramps, stating what families in the suburbs kept dogs, what families gave, whether what they gave was digestible or not, rounding up with a list of those who do not give, and who have telephone connection with the police station. This would enable them to avoid dogs and rebuffs, would save the tramp the time he expends on futile efforts to find work he doesn't want, and as for the people who have to keep the dogs to ward off the tramps, they, too, would be benefited, because the tramps would begin to avoid them, and in a short while they would be able to dispense with t

t," said Mr. Pedagog. "For there are pe

. "The quarter class are people who would rather not hear the hand-organ, and it is to them that a grinder of business capacity would naturally address himself. It is far pleasanter t

but I don't think your scheme is. Huma

an ideal is ideal is the chief argument against its amounting to much. But I am c

iting of a library in mind

the books I have in mind, the public lib

is to be what?" que

ry. The tales I'd write for them would be so interesting that the attention of the wayfarer would be arrested at once. His mind would be riveted on the situation at once, and, instead of hurrying along and trying to leave the beggar behind, he would stop, button-hole him, and ask him to sit down on a convenient doorstep and continue. If a beggar could have such a story to tell as would en

techoker, "that it will be an e

he beggars, if it is not generally known that it is I and not they who are responsible for the w

suggested

glad of the opportunity, giving them ten per cent. of the profits. I know a man who makes fifty dollars a year at magazine wor