TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Apart from a few punctuation corrections, no other changes have been made in the text.

THE INVENTIONS
OF THE IDIOT

by

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS

Author of "A House-Boat on the Styx"
"The Pursuit of the House-Boat"
"Olympian Nights"
Etc. Etc.

New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1904

Copyright, 1903, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

Published April, 1904

TO

YOU

Contents

THE INVENTIONS OF THE IDIOT

I
The Culinary Guild

It was before the Idiot's marriage, and in the days when he was nothing more than a plain boarder in Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's High-class Home for Single Gentlemen, that he put what the School-master termed his "alleged mind" on plans for the amelioration of the condition of the civilized.

"The trials of the barbarian are really nothing as compared with the tribulations of civilized man," he said, as the waitress passed him a piece of steak that had been burned to a crisp. "In the Cannibal Islands a cook who would send a piece of broiled missionary to her employer's table in this condition would herself be roasted before another day had dawned. We, however, must grin and bear it, because our esteemed landlady cannot find anywhere in this town a woman better suited for the labors of the kitchen than the blank she has had the misfortune to draw in the culinary lottery, familiarly known to us, her victims, as Bridget."

"This is an exceptional case," said Mr. Pedagog. "We haven't had a steak like this before in several weeks."

"True," returned the Idiot. "This is a sirloin, I believe. The last steak we had was a rump steak, and it was not burned to a crisp, I admit. It was only boiled, if I remember rightly, by mistake; Bridget having lost her fifth consecutive cousin in ten days the night before, and being in consequence so prostrated that she could not tell a gridiron from a lawn-mower."

"Well, you know the popular superstition, Mr. Idiot," said the Poet. "The devil sends the cooks."

"I don't believe it," retorted the Idiot. "That's one of those proverbs that haven't a particle of truth in 'em—nor a foundation in reason either, like 'Never look a gift horse in the mouth.' Of all absurd advice ever given to man by a thoughtless thinker, that, I think, bears the palm. I know a man who didn't look a gift horse in the mouth, and the consequence was that he accepted a horse that was twenty-eight years old. The beast died in his stables three days later, and the beneficiary had to pay five dollars to have him carted away. As for the devil sending the cooks, I haven't any faith in the theory. Any person who had come from the devil would know how to manage a fire better than ninety-nine per cent. of the cooks ever born. It would be a good thing if every one of 'em were forced to serve an apprenticeship with the Prince of Darkness. However, steak like this serves a good purpose. It serves to bind our little circle more firmly together. There's nothing like mutual suffering to increase the sympathy that should exist between men situated as we are; and as for Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog, I wish her to understand distinctly that I am criticising the cook and not herself. If this particular dainty had been prepared by her own fair hand, I doubt not I should want more of it."

"I thank you," returned the landlady, somewhat mollified by this remark. "If I had more time I should occasionally do the cooking myself, but, as it is, I am overwhelmed with work."

"I can bear witness to that," observed Mr. Whitechoker. "Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog is one of the most useful ladies in my congregation. If it were not for her, many a heathen would be going without garments to-day."

"Well, I don't like to criticise," said the Idiot, "but I think the heathen at home should be considered before the heathen abroad. If your congregation would have a guild to look after such heathen as the Poet and the Doctor and myself, I am convinced it would be more appreciated by those who benefited by its labors than it is at present by the barbarians who try to wear the misfits it sends out. A Christian whose plain but honest breakfast is well cooked is apt to be far more grateful than a barbarian who is wearing a pair of trousers made of calico and a coat three sizes too small in the body and nine sizes too large in the arms. I will go further. I believe that if the domestic heathen were cared for they would do much better work, would earn better pay, and would, out of mere gratitude, set apart a sufficiently large portion of their increased earnings to be devoted to the purchase of tailor-made costumes, which would please the cannibals better, far better, than the amateur creations they now get. I know I'd contribute some of my surplus."

"What would you have such a guild do?" queried Mr. Whitechoker.

"Do? There'd be so much for it to do that the members could hardly find time to rest," returned the Idiot. "Do? Why, my dear sir, take this house, for instance, and see what it could do here. What a boon it would be for me if some kind-hearted person would come here once a week and sew buttons on my clothes, darn my socks—in short, keep me mended. What better work for one who desires to make the world brighter, happier, and less sinful!"

"I fail to see how the world would be brighter, happier, or less sinful if your suspender-buttons were kept firm, and your stockings darned, and your wardrobe generally mended," said Mr. Pedagog. "I grant that such a guild would be doing a noble work if it would take you in hand and correct many of your impressions, revise your well-known facts so as to bring them more in accord with indubitable truths, and impart to your customs some of that polish which you so earnestly strive for in your dress."

"Thank you," said the Idiot, suavely. "But I don't wish to overburden the kind ladies to whom I refer. If my costumes could be looked after I might find time to look after my customs, and, I assure you, Mr. Pedagog, if at any time you will undertake to deliver a course of lectures on Etiquette, I will gladly subscribe for two orchestra-chairs and endeavor to occupy both of them. At any rate, to return to the main point, I claim that the world would be happier and brighter and less sinful if the domestic heathen were kept mended by such a guild, and I challenge any one here to deny, even on so slight a basis as the loose suspender-button, the truth of what I say. When I arise in the morning and find a button gone, do I make genial remarks about the joys of life? I do not. I use words. Sometimes one word, which need not be repeated here. I am unhappy, and, being unhappy, the world seems dark and dreary, and in speaking impatiently, though very much to the point, as I do, I am guilty of an offence that is sinful. With such a start in the morning, I come here to the table. Mr. Pedagog sees that I am not quite myself. He asks me if I am not feeling well, an irritating question at any time, but particularly so to a man with a suspender-button gone. I retort. He re-retorts, until our converse is warmer than the coffee, and our relations colder than the waffles. Finally I leave the house, slamming the door behind me, structurally weakening the house, and go to business, where I wreak my vengeance upon the second clerk, who takes it out of the office-boy, who goes home and vents his wrath on his little sister, who, goaded into recklessness, teases the baby until he yells and gets spanked by his mother for being noisy. Now, why should a loose suspender-button be allowed to subject that baby to such humiliation, and who can deny that, if it had been properly sewed on by a guild, such as I have mentioned, the baby never would have been spanked for the causes mentioned? What is your answer, Mr. Whitechoker?"

"Truly, I am so breathless at your logic that I cannot reason," said the Minister. "But haven't we digressed a little? We were speaking of cooks, and we conclude with a pathetic little allegory about a suspender-button and a baby that is not only teased but spanked."

"The baby could get the same spanking for reasons based on the shortcomings of the cooks," said the Idiot. "I am irritated when I am served with green pease hard enough to batter down Gibraltar if properly aimed; when my coffee is a warmed-over reminiscence of last night's demi-tasse, I leave the house in a frame of mind that bodes ill for the junior clerk, and the effect on the baby is ultimately the same."

"And—er—you'd have the ladies whose energies are now devoted towards the clothing of the heathen come here and do the cooking?" queried the School-master.

"I leave if they do," said the Doctor. "I have seen too much of the effects of amateur cookery in my profession to want any of it. They are good cooks in theory, but not in practice."

"There you have it!" said the Idiot, triumphantly. "Right in a nutshell. That's where the cooks are always weak. They have none of the theory and all of the practice. If they based practice on theory, they'd cook better. Wherefore let your theoretical cooks seek out the practical and instruct them in the principles of the culinary art. Think of what twelve ladies could do; twelve ladies trained in the sewing-circle to talk rapidly, working five hours a day apiece, could devote an hour a week to three hundred and sixty cooks, and tell them practically all they themselves know in that time; and if, in addition to this, twelve other ladies, forming an auxiliary guild, would make dresses and bonnets and things for the same cooks, instead of for the cannibals, it would keep them good-natured."

"Splendid scheme!" said the Doctor. "So practical. Your brain must weigh half an ounce."

"I've never had it weighed," said the Idiot, "but, I fancy, it's a good one. It's the only one I have, anyhow, and it's done me good service, and shows no signs of softening. But, returning to the cooks, good-nature is as essential to the making of a good cook as are apples to the making of a dumpling. You can't associate the word dumpling with ill-nature, and just as the poet throws himself into his work, and as he is of a cheerful or a mournful disposition, so does his work appear cheerful or mournful, so do the productions of a cook take on the attributes of their maker. A dyspeptic cook will prepare food in a manner so indigestible that it were ruin to partake of it. A light-hearted cook will make light bread; a pessimistic cook will serve flour bricks in lieu thereof."

"I think possibly you are right when you say that," said the Doctor. "I have myself observed that the people who sing at their work do the best work."

"But the worst singing," growled the School-master.

"That may be true," put in the Idiot; "but you cannot expect a cook on sixteen dollars a month to be a prima-donna. Now, if Mr. Whitechoker will undertake to start a sewing-circle in his church for people who don't care to wear clothing, but to sow the seeds of concord and good cookery throughout the kitchens of this land, I am prepared to prophesy that at the end of the year there will be more happiness and less depression in this part of the world; and once eliminate dyspepsia from our midst, and get civilization and happiness controvertible terms, then you will find your foreign missionary funds waxing so fat that instead of the amateur garments for the heathen you now send them, you will be able to open an account at Worth's and Poole's for every barbarian in creation. The scheme for the sewing on of suspender-buttons and the miscellaneous mending that needs to be done for lone-lorn savages like myself might be left in abeyance until the culinary scheme has been established. Bachelors constitute a class, a small class only, of humanity, but the regeneration of cooks is a universal need."

"I think your scheme is certainly a picturesque one and novel," said Mr. Whitechoker. "There seems to be a good deal in it. Don't you think so, Mr. Pedagog?"

"Yes—I do," said Mr. Pedagog, wearily. "A great deal—of language."

And amid the laugh at his expense which followed, the Idiot, joining in, departed.

II
A Suggestion for the Cable-cars

"Heigh-ho!" sighed the Idiot, rubbing his eyes sleepily. "This is a weary world."

"What? This from you?" smiled the Poet. "I never expected to hear that plaint from a man of your cheerful disposition."

"Humph!" said the Idiot, with difficulty repressing a yawn. "Humph! and I may add, likewise, tut! What do you take me for—an insulated sun-beam? I can't help it if shadows camp across my horizon occasionally. I wouldn't give a cent for the man who never had his moments of misery. It takes night to enable us to appreciate daytime. Misery is a foil necessary to the full appreciation of joy. I'm glad I am sort of down in the mouth to-day. I'll be all right to-morrow, and I'll enjoy to-morrow all the more for to-day's megrim. But for the present, I repeat, this is a weary world."

"Oh, I don't think so," observed the School-master. "The world doesn't seem to me to betray any signs of weariness. It got to work at the usual hour this morning, and, as far as I can judge, has been revolving at the usual rate of speed ever since."

"The Idiot's mistake is a common one," put in the Doctor. "I find it frequently in my practice."

"That's a confession," retorted the Idiot. "Do you find out these mistakes in your practice before or after the death of the patient?"

"That mistake," continued the Doctor, paying apparently little heed to the Idiot's remark—"that mistake lies in the Idiot's assumption that he is himself the world. He regards himself as the earth, as all of life, and, because he happens to be weary, the world is a weary one."

"It isn't a fatal disease, is it?" queried the Idiot, anxiously. "I am not likely to become so impressed with that idea, for instance, that I shall have to be put in a padded cell and manacled so that I may not turn perpetual handsprings under the hallucination that, being the world, it is my duty to revolve?"

"No," replied the Doctor, with a laugh. "No, indeed. That is not at all likely to happen, but I think it would be a good idea if you were to carry the hallucination out far enough to put a cake of ice on your head, assuming that to be the north pole, and cool off that brain of yours."

"That is a good idea," returned the Idiot; "and if Mary will bring me the ice that was used to cool the coffee this morning, I shall be pleased to try the experiment. Meanwhile, this is a weary world."

"Then why under the canopy don't you leave it and go to some other world?" snapped Mr. Pedagog. "You are under no obligation to remain here. With a river on either side of the city, and a New York Juggernaut Company, Unlimited, running trolley-cars up and down two of our more prominent highways, suicide is within the reach of all. Of course, we should be sorry to lose you, in a way, but I have known men to recover from even greater afflictions than that."

"Thank you for the suggestion," replied the Idiot, transferring four large, porous buckwheat-cakes to his plate. "Thank you very much, but I have a pleasanter and more lingering method of suicide right here. Death by buckwheat-cakes is like being pierced by a Toledo blade. You do not realize the terrors of your situation until you cease to be susceptible to them. Furthermore, I do not believe in suicide. It is, in my judgment, the worst crime a man can commit, and I cannot but admire the remarkable discernment evinced by the Fates in making of it its own inevitable capital punishment. A man may commit murder and escape death, but in the commission of suicide he is sure of execution. Just as Virtue is its own reward, so is Suicide its own amercement."

"Been reading the dictionary again?" asked the Poet.

"No, not exactly," said the Idiot, with a smile, "but—it's a kind of joke on me, I suppose—I have just been stuck, to use a polite term, on a book called Roget's Thesaurus, and, if I want to get hold of a new word that will increase my seeming importance to the community, I turn to it. That's where I got 'amercement.' I don't hold that its use in this especial case is beyond cavil—that's another Thesaurian term—but I don't suppose any one here would notice that fact. It goes here, and I shall not use it elsewhere."

"I am interested to know how you ever came to be the owner of a Thesaurus," said the School-master, with a grim smile at the idea of the Idiot having such a book in his possession. "Except on the score of affinities. You are both very wordy."

"Meaning pleonastic, I presume," retorted the Idiot.

"I beg your pardon?" said the School-master.

"Never mind," said the Idiot. "I won't press the analogy, but I will say that those who are themselves periphrastic should avoid criticising others for being ambaginous."

"I think you mean ambiguous," said the School-master, elevating his eyebrows in triumph.

"I thought you'd think that," retorted the Idiot. "That's why I used the word 'ambaginous.' I'll lend you my dictionary to freshen up your phraseology. Meanwhile, I'll tell you how I happened to get a Thesaurus. I thought it was an animal, and when I saw that a New York bookseller had a lot of them marked down from two dollars to one, I sent and got one. I thought it was strange for a bookseller to be selling rare animals, but that was his business, not mine; and as I was anxious to see what kind of a creature a Thesaurus was, I invested. When I found out it was a book and not a tame relic of the antediluvian animal kingdom, I thought I wouldn't say anything about it, but you people here are so inquisitive you've learned my secret."

"And wasn't it an animal?" asked Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog.

"My dear—my dear!" ejaculated Mr. Pedagog. "Pray—ah—I beg of you, do not enter into this discussion."

"No, Mrs. Pedagog," observed the Idiot, "it was not. It was nothing more than a book, which, when once you have read it, you would not be without, since it gives your vocabulary a twist which makes you proof against ninety-nine out of every one hundred conversationalists in the world, no matter how weak your cause."

"I am beginning to understand the causes of your weariness," observed Mr. Pedagog, acridly. "You have been memorizing syllables. Really, I should think you were in danger of phonetic prostration."

"Not a bit of it," said the Idiot. "Those words are stimulating, not depressing. I begin to feel better already, now that I have spoken them. I am not half so weary as I was, but for my weariness I had good cause. I suffered all night from a most frightful nightmare. It utterly destroyed my rest."

"Welsh-rarebit?" queried the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally imbibed, with a tone of reproach. "If so, why was I not with you?"

"That question should be its own answer," replied the Idiot. "A man who will eat a Welsh-rarebit alone is not only a person of a sullen disposition, but of reckless mould as well. I would no sooner think of braving a Welsh-rarebit unaccompanied than I would think of trying to swim across the British Channel without a lifesaving boat following in my wake."

"I question if so light a body as you could have a wake!" said Mr. Pedagog, coldly.

"I am sorry, but I can't agree with you, Mr. Pedagog," said the Bibliomaniac. "A tugboat, most insignificant of crafts, roils up the surface of the sea more than an ocean steamer does. Fuss goes with feathers more than with large bodies."

"Well, they're neither of 'em in it with a cake of soap for real, bona-fide suds," said the Idiot, complacently, as he helped himself to his thirteenth buckwheat-cake. "However, wakes have nothing to do with the case. I had a most frightful dream, and it was not due to Welsh-rarebits, but to my fatal weakness, which, not having my Thesaurus at hand, I must identify by the commonplace term of courtesy. You may not have noticed it, but courtesy is my strong point."

"We haven't observed the fact," said Mr. Pedagog; "but what of it? Have you been courteous to any one?"

"I have," replied the Idiot, "and a nightmare is what it brought me. I rode up-town on a trolley-car last night, and I gave up my seat to sixteen ladies, two of whom, by-the-way, thanked me."

"I don't see why more than one of them should thank you," sniffed the landlady. "If a man gives up a trolley-car seat to sixteen ladies, only one of them can occupy it."

"I stand corrected," said the Idiot. "I gave up a seat to ladies sixteen times between City Hall and Twenty-third Street. I can't bring myself to sit down while a woman stands, and every time I'd get a seat some woman would get on the car. Hence it was that I gave up my seat to sixteen ladies. Why two of them should thank me, considering the rules, I do not know. It certainly is not the custom. At any rate, if I had walked up-town, I should not have had more exercise than I got on that car, bobbing up and down so many times, and lurching here and lurching there every time the car stopped, started, or turned a corner. Whether it was the thanks or the lurching I got, I don't know, but the incidents of the ride were so strongly impressed upon me that I dreamed all night, only in my dreams I was not giving up car seats. The first seat I gave up to a woman in the dream was an eighty-thousand-dollar seat in the Stock Exchange. It was expensive courtesy, but I did it, and mourned so over the result that I waked up and discovered that it was but a dream. Then I went to sleep again. This time I was at the opera. I had the best seat in the house, when in came a woman who hadn't a chair. Same result. I got up. She sat down, and I had to stand behind a pillar where I could neither see nor hear. More grief; waked up again, more tired than when I went to bed. In ten minutes I dozed off. Found myself an ambitious statesman running for the Presidency. Was elected and inaugurated. Up comes a Woman's Rights candidate. More courtesy. Gave up the Presidential chair to her and went home to obscurity, when again I awoke tireder than ever. Clock struck four. Fell asleep again. This time I was prepared for anything that might happen. I found myself in a trolley-car, but with me I had a perforated chair-bottom, such as the street peddlers sell. Lady got aboard. I put the perforated chair-bottom on my lap and invited her to sit down. She thanked me and did so. Then another lady got on. The lady on my lap moved up and made room for the second lady. She sat down. Between them they must have weighed three hundred pounds. I could have stood that, but as time went on more ladies got aboard, and every time that happened these first-comers would move up and make room for them. How they did it I can't say, any more than I can say how in real life three women can find room in a car-seat vacated by a little child. They did the former just as they do the latter, until finally I found myself flattened into the original bench like the pattern figure of a carpet. I felt like an entaglio; thirty women by actual count were pressing me to remain, as it were, but the worst of it all was they none of them seemed to live anywhere. We rode on and on and on, but nobody got off. I tried to move—and couldn't. We passed my corner, but there I was fixed. I couldn't breathe, and so couldn't call out, and I verily believe that if I hadn't finally waked up I should by this time have reached Hong-Kong, for I have a distinct recollection of passing through Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Honolulu. Finally, I did wake, however, simply worn out with my night's rest, which, gentlemen, is why I say, as I have already said, this is a weary world."

"Well, I don't blame you," said Mr. Whitechoker, kindly. "That was a most remarkable dream."

"Yes," assented Mr. Pedagog. "But quite in line with his waking thoughts."

"Very likely," said the Idiot, rising and preparing to depart. "It was absurd in most of its features, but in one of them it was excellent. I am going to see the president of the Electric Juggernaut Company, as you call it, in regard to it to-day. I think there is money in that idea of having an extra chair-seat for every passenger to hold in his lap. In that way twice as many seated passengers can be accommodated, and countless people with tender feet will be spared the pain of having other wayfarers standing upon them."

III
The Transatlantic Trolley Company

"If I were a millionaire," began the Idiot one Sunday morning, as he and his friends took their accustomed seats at the breakfast-table, "I would devote a tenth of my income to the poor, a tenth to children's fresh-air funds, and the balance to the education through travel of a dear and intimate friend of mine."

"That would be a generous distribution of your wealth," said Mr. Whitechoker, graciously. "But upon what would you live yourself?"

"I should stipulate in the bargain with my dear and intimate friend that we should be inseparable; that wherever he should go I should go, and that, of the funds devoted to his education through travel, one-half should be paid to me as my commission for letting him into a good thing."

"You certainly have good business sense," put in the Bibliomaniac. "I wish I had had when I was collecting rare editions."

"Collecting rare books and a good business sense seldom go together, I fancy," said the Idiot. "I began collecting books once, but I gave it up and took to collecting coins. I chose my coin and devoted my time to getting in that variety alone, and it has paid me."

"I don't exactly gather your meaning," said Mr. Whitechoker. "You chose your coin?"

"Precisely. I said, 'Here! Most coin collectors spend their time looking for one or two rare coins, for which, when they are found, they pay fabulous prices. The result is oftentimes penury. I, on the other hand, will look for coins of a common sort which do not command fabulous prices.' So I chose United States five-dollar gold pieces, irrespective of dates, for my collection, and the result is moderate affluence. I have between sixty and a hundred of them at my savings-bank, and when I have found it necessary to realize on them I have not experienced the slightest difficulty in forcing them back into circulation at cost."

"You are a wise Idiot," said the Bibliomaniac, settling back in his chair in a disgusted, tired sort of way. He had expected some sympathy from the Idiot as a fellow-collector, even though their aims were different. It is always difficult for a man whose ten-thousand-dollar library has brought six hundred dollars in the auction-room to find, even in the ranks of collectors, one who understands his woes and helps him bear the burden thereof by expressions of confidence in his sanity.

"Then you believe in travel, do you?" asked the Doctor.

"I believe there is nothing broadens the mind so much," returned the Idiot.

"But do you believe it will develop a mind where there isn't one?" asked the School-master, unpleasantly. "Or, to put it more favorably, don't you think there would be danger in taking the germ of a mind in a small head and broadening it until it runs the risk of finding itself confined to cramped quarters?"

"That is a question for a physician to answer," said the Idiot. "But, if I were you, I wouldn't travel if I thought there was any such danger."

"Tu quoque," retorted the School-master, "is not true repartee."

"I shall have to take your word for that," returned the Idiot, "since I have not a Latin dictionary with me, and all the Latin I know is to be found in the quotations in the back of my dictionary, like 'Status quo ante,' 'In vino veritas,' and 'Et tu, Brute.' However, as I said before, I'd like to travel, and I would if it were not that the sea and I are not on very good terms with each other. It makes me ill to cross the East River on the bridge, I'm so susceptible to sea-sickness."

"You'd get over that in a very few days," said the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally imbibed. "I have crossed the ocean a dozen times, and I'm never sea-sick after the third day out."

"Ah, but those three days!" said the Idiot. "They must resemble the three days of grace on a note that you know you couldn't pay if you had three years of grace. I couldn't stand them, I am afraid. Why, only last summer I took a drive off in the country, and the motion of the wagon going over the thank-ye-marms in the road made me so sea-sick before I'd gone a mile that I wanted to lie down and die. I think I should have done so if the horse hadn't run away and forced me to ride back home whether I wanted to or not."

"You ought to fight that," said the Doctor. "By-and-by, if you give way to a weakness of that sort, the creases in your morning newspaper will affect you similarly as you read it. If you ever have a birthday, let us know, and we'll help you to overcome the tendency by buying you a baby-jumper for you to swing around in every morning until you get used to the motion."

"It would be more to the purpose," replied the Idiot, "if you as a physician would invent a preventive of sea-sickness. I'd buy a bottle and go abroad at once on my coin collection if you would guarantee it to kill or to cure instantaneously."

"There is such a nostrum," said the Doctor.

"There is, indeed," put in the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally imbibes. "I've tried it."

"And were you sea-sick?" asked the Doctor.

"I never knew," replied the Genial Old Gentleman. "It made me so ill that I never thought to inquire what was the matter with me. But one thing is certain, I'll take my sea-voyages straight after this."

"I'd like to go by rail," said the Idiot, after a moment's thought.

"That is a desire quite characteristic of you," said the School-master. "It is so probable that you could. Why not say that you'd like to cross the Atlantic on a tight-rope?"

"Because I have no such ambition," replied the Idiot. "Though it might be fun if the tight-rope were a trolley-wire, and one could sit comfortably in a spacious cab while speeding over the water. I should think that would be exhilarating enough. Just imagine how fine it would be on a stormy day to sit looking out of your cab-window far above the surface of the raging and impotent sea, skipping along at electric speed, and daring the waves to do their worst—that would be bliss."

"And so practical," growled the Bibliomaniac.

"Bliss rarely is practical," said the Idiot. "Bliss is a sort of mugwump blessing—too full of the ideal and too barren in practicability."

"Well," said Mr. Whitechoker. "I don't know why we should say that trolley-cars between New York and London never can be. If we had told our grandfathers a hundred years ago that a cable for the transmission of news could be laid under the sea, they would have laughed us to scorn."

"That's true," said the School-master. "But we know more than our grandfathers did."

"Well, rather," interrupted the Idiot. "My great-grandfather, who died in 1799, had never even heard of Andrew Jackson, and if you had asked him what he thought of Darwin, he'd have thought you were guying him."

"Respect for age, sir," retorted Mr. Pedagog, "restrains me from characterizing your great-grandfather, if, as you intimate, he knew less than you do. However, apart from the comparative lack of knowledge in the Idiot's family, Mr. Whitechoker, you must remember that with the advance of the centuries we have ourselves developed a certain amount of brains—enough, at least, to understand that there is a limit even to the possibilities of electricity. Now, when you say that just because an Atlantic cable would have been regarded as an object of derision in the eighteenth century, we should not deride one who suggests the possibility of a marine trolley-road between London and New York in the twentieth century, it appears to me that you are talking—er—talking—I don't like to say nonsense to one of your cloth, but—"

"Through his hat is the idiom you are trying to recall, I think, Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "Mr. Whitechoker is talking through his hat is what you mean to say?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Idiot," said the School-master; "but when I find that I need your assistance in framing my conversation, I shall—er—I shall give up talking. I mean to say that I do not think Mr. Whitechoker can justify his conclusions, and talks without having given the subject concerning which he has spoken due reflection. The cable runs along the solid foundation of the bed of the sea. It is a simple matter, comparatively, but a trolley-wire stretched across the ocean by the simplest rules of gravitation could not be made to stay up."

"No doubt you are correct," said Mr. Whitechoker, meekly. "I did not mean that I expected ever to see a trolley-road across the sea, but I did mean to say that man has made such wonderful advances in the past hundred years that we cannot really state the limit of his possibilities. It is manifest that no one to-day can devise a plan by means of which such a wire could be carried, but—"

"I fear you gentlemen would starve as inventors," said the Idiot. "What's the matter with balloons?"

"Balloons for what?" retorted Mr. Pedagog.

"For holding up the trolley-wires," replied the Idiot. "It is perfectly feasible. Fasten the ends of your wire in London and New York, and from coast to coast station two lines of sufficient strength to keep the wire raised as far above the level of the sea as you require. That's simple enough."

"And what, pray, in this frenzy of the elements, this raging storm of which you have spoken," said Mr. Pedagog, impatiently—"what would then keep your balloons from blowing away?"

"The trolley-wire, of course," said the Idiot. Mr. Pedagog lapsed into a hopelessly wrathful silence for a moment, and then he said:

"Well, I sincerely hope your plan is adopted, and that the promoters will make you superintendent, with an office in the mid-ocean balloon."

"Thanks for your good wishes, Mr. Pedagog," the Idiot answered. "If they are realized I shall remember them, and show my gratitude to you by using my influence to have you put in charge of the gas service. Meantime, however, it seems to me that our ocean steamships could be developed along logical lines so that the trip from New York to Liverpool could be made in a very much shorter period of time than is now required."

"We are getting back to the common-sense again," said the Bibliomaniac. "That is a proposition to which I agree. Ten years ago eight days was considered a good trip. With the development of the twin-screw steamer the time has been reduced to approximately six days."

"Or a saving, really, of two days because of the extra screw," said the Idiot.

"Precisely," observed the Bibliomaniac.

"So that, provided there are extra screws enough, there isn't any reason why the trip should not be made in two or three hours."

"Ah—what was that?" said the Bibliomaniac. "I don't exactly follow you."

"One extra screw, you say, has saved two days?"

"Yes."

"Then two extra screws would save four days, three would save six days, and five extra screws would send the boat over in approximately no time," said the Idiot. "So, if it takes a man two hours to succumb to sea-sickness, a boat going over in less than that time would eliminate sea-sickness; more people would go; boats could run every hour, and Mr. Whitechoker could have a European trip every week without deserting his congregation."

"Inestimable boon!" cried Mr. Whitechoker, with a laugh.

"Wouldn't it be!" said the Idiot. "Unless I change my mind, I think I shall stay in this country until this style of greyhound is perfected. Then, gentlemen, I shall tear myself away from you, and seek knowledge in foreign pastures."

"Well, I am sure," said Mr. Pedagog—"I am sure that we all hope you will change your mind."

"Then you want me to go abroad?" said the Idiot.

"No," said Mr. Pedagog. "No—not so much that as that we feel if you were to change your mind the change could not fail to be for the better. A mind like yours ought to be changed."

"Well, I don't know," said the Idiot. "I suppose it would be a good thing if I broke it up into smaller denominations, but I've had it so long that I have become attached to it; but there is one thing about it, there is plenty of it, so that in case any of you gentlemen find your own insufficient I shall be only too happy to give you a piece of it without charge. Meanwhile, if Mrs. Pedagog will kindly let me have my bill for last week, I'll be obliged."

"It won't be ready until to-morrow, Mr. Idiot," said the landlady, in surprise.

"I'm sorry," said the Idiot, rising. "My scribbling-paper has run out. I wanted to put in this morning writing a poem on the back of it."

"A poem? What about?" said Mr. Pedagog, with an irritating chuckle.

"It was to be a triolet on Omniscience," said the Idiot. "And, strange to say, sir, you were to be the hero, if by any possibility I could squeeze you into a French form."

IV
The Incorporation of the Idiot

"How is business these days, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Poet, as the one addressed laid down the morning paper with a careworn expression on his face. "Good, I hope?"

"Fair, only," replied the Idiot. "My honored employer was quite blue about things yesterday, and if I hadn't staved him off I think he'd have proposed swapping places with me. He has said quite often of late that I had the best of it, because all I had to earn was my salary, whereas he had to earn my salary and his own living besides. I offered to give him ten per cent. of my salary for ten per cent. of his living, but he said he guessed he wouldn't, adding that I seemed to be as great an Idiot as ever."

"I fancy he was right there," said Mr. Pedagog. "I should really like to know how a man of your peculiar mental construction can be of the slightest practical value to a banker. I ask the question in all kindness, too, meaning to cast no reflections whatever upon either you or your employer. You are a roaring success in your own line, which is all any one could ask of you."

"There's hominy for you, as the darky said to the hotel guest," returned the Idiot. "Any person who says that discord exists at this table doesn't know what he is talking about. Even the oil and the vinegar mix in the caster—that is, I judge they do from the oleaginous appearance of the vinegar. But I am very useful to my employer, Mr. Pedagog. He says frequently that he wouldn't know what not to do if it were not for me."

"Aren't you losing control of your tongue?" queried the Bibliomaniac, looking at the Idiot in wonderment. "Don't you mean that he says he wouldn't know what to do if it were not for you?"

"No, I don't," said the Idiot. "I never lose control of my tongue. I meant exactly what I said. Mr. Barlow told me, in so many words, that if it were not for me he wouldn't know what not to do. He calls me his Back Action Patent Reversible Counsellor. If he is puzzled over an intricate point he sends for me and says: 'Such and such a thing being the case, Mr. Idiot, what would you do? Don't think about it, but tell me on impulse. Your thoughtless opinions are worth more to me than I can tell you.' So I tell him on impulse just what I should do, whereupon he does the other thing, and comes out ahead in nine cases out of ten."

"And you confess it, eh?" said the Doctor, with a curve on his lip.

"I certainly do," said the Idiot. "The world must take me for what I am. I'm not going to be one thing for myself, and build up a fictitious Idiot for the world. The world calls you men of pretence conceited, whereas, by pretending to be something that you are not, you give to the world what I should call convincing evidence that you are not at all conceited, but rather somewhat ashamed of what you know yourselves to be. Now, I rather believe in conceit—real honest pride in yourself as you know yourself to be. I am an Idiot, and it is my ambition to be a perfect Idiot. If I had been born a jackass, I should have endeavored to be a perfect jackass."

"You'd have found it easy," said Mr. Pedagog, dryly.

"Would I?" said the Idiot. "I'll have to take your word for it, sir, for I have never been a jackass, and so cannot form an opinion on the subject."

"Pride goeth before a fall," said Mr. Whitechoker, seeing a chance to work in a moral reflection.

"Exactly," said the Idiot. "Wherefore I admire pride. It is a danger-signal that enables man to avoid the fall. If Adam had had any pride he'd never have fallen—but speaking about my controlling my tongue, it is not entirely out of the range of possibilities that I shall lose control of myself."

"I expected that, sooner or later," said the Doctor. "Is it to be Bloomingdale or a private mad-house you are going to?"

"Neither," replied the Idiot, calmly. "I shall stay here. For, as the poet says,

"''Tis best to bear the ills we hov
Nor fly to those we know not of.'"

"Ho!" jeered the Poet. "I must confess, my dear Idiot, that I do not think you are a success in quotation. Hamlet spoke those lines differently."

"Shakespeare's Hamlet did. My little personal Shakespeare makes his Hamlet an entirely different, less stilted sort of person," said the Idiot.

"You have a personal Shakespeare, have you?" queried the Bibliomaniac.

"Of course I have," the Idiot answered. "Haven't you?"

"I have not," said the Bibliomaniac, shortly.

"Well, I'm sorry for you then," sighed the Idiot, putting a fried potato in his mouth. "Very sorry. I wouldn't give a cent for another man's ideals. I want my own ideals, and I have my own ideal of Shakespeare. In fancy, Shakespeare and I have roamed over the fields of Warwickshire together, and I've had more fun imagining the kind of things he and I would have said to each other than I ever got out of his published plays, few of which have escaped the ungentle hands of the devastators."

"You mean commentators, I imagine," said Mr. Pedagog.

"I do," said the Idiot. "It's all the same, whether you call them commentors or devastators. The result is the same. New editions of Shakespeare are issued every year, and people buy them to see not what Shakespeare has written, but what new quip some opinionated devastator has tried to fasten on his memory. In a hundred years from now the works of Shakespeare will differ as much from what they are to-day as to-day's versions differ from what they were when Shakespeare wrote them. It's mighty discouraging to one like myself who would like to write works."

"You are convicted out of your own mouth," said the Bibliomaniac. "A moment since you wasted your pity on me because I didn't mutilate Shakespeare so as to make him my own, and now you attack the commentators for doing precisely the same thing. They're as much entitled to their opinions as you are to yours."

"Did you ever learn to draw parallels when you were in school?" asked the Idiot.

"I did, and I think I've made a perfect parallel in this case. You attack people in one breath for what you commiserate me for not doing in another," said the Bibliomaniac.

"Not exactly," said the Idiot. "I don't object to the commentators for commentating, but I do object to their putting out their versions of Shakespeare as Shakespeare. I might as well have my edition published. It certainly would be popular, especially where, in 'Julius Cæsar,' I introduce five Cassiuses and have them all fall on their swords together with military precision, like a 'Florodora' sextette, for instance."

"Well, I hope you'll never print such an atrocity as that," cried the Bibliomaniac, hotly. "If there's one thing in literature without excuse and utterly contemptible it is the comic version, the parody of a masterpiece."

"You need have no fear on that score," returned the Idiot. "I haven't time to rewrite Shakespeare, and, since I try never to stop short of absolute completeness, I shall not embark on the enterprise. If I do, however, I shall not do as the commentators do, and put on my title-page 'Shakespeare. Edited by Willie Wilkins,' but 'Shakespeare As He Might Have Been, Had His Plays Been Written By An Idiot.'"

"I have no doubt that you could do great work with 'Hamlet,'" observed the Poet.

"I think so myself," said the Idiot. "But I shall never write 'Hamlet.' I don't want to have my fair fame exposed to the merciless hands of the devastators."

"I shall never cease to regret," said Mr. Pedagog, after a moment's thought, "that you are so timid. I should very much like to see 'The Works of the Idiot.' I admit that my desire is more or less a morbid one. It is quite on a plane with the feeling that prompts me to wish to see that unfortunate man on the Bowery who exhibits his forehead, which is sixteen inches high, beginning with his eyebrows, for a dime. The strange, the bizarre in nature, has always interested me. The more unnatural the nature, the more I gloat upon it. From that point of view I do most earnestly hope that when you are inspired with a work you will let me at least see it."

"Very well," answered the Idiot. "I shall put your name down as a subscriber to the Idiot Monthly Magazine, which some of my friends contemplate publishing. That is what I mean when I say I may shortly lose control of myself. These friends of mine profess to have been so impressed by my dicta that they have asked me if I would allow myself to be incorporated into a stock company, the object of which should be to transform my personality into printed pages. Hardly a day goes by but I devote a portion of my time to a poem in which the thought is conspicuous either by its absence or its presence. My schemes for the amelioration of the condition of the civilized are notorious among those who know me; my views on current topics are eagerly sought for; my business instinct, as I have already told you, is invaluable to my employer, and my fiction is unsurpassed in its fictitiousness. What more is needed for a magazine? You have the poetry, the philanthropy, the man of to-day, the fictitiousness, and the business instinct necessary for the successful modern magazine all concentrated in one person. Why not publish that person, say my friends, and I, feeling as I do that no man has a right to the selfish enjoyment of the great gifts nature has bestowed upon him, of course can only agree. I am to be incorporated with a capital stock of five hundred thousand dollars. One hundred thousand dollars' worth of myself I am to be permitted to retain; the rest my friends will subscribe for at fifty cents on the dollar. If any of you want shares in the enterprise I have no doubt you can be accommodated."

"I'm obliged to you for the opportunity," said the Doctor. "But I have to be very careful about things I take stock in, and in general I regard you as a thing in which I should prefer not to take stock."

"And I," observed Mr. Pedagog—"I have never up to this time taken any stock in you, and I make it a rule to be guided in life by precedent. Therefore I must be counted out."

"I'll wait until you are listed at the Stock Exchange," put in the Bibliomaniac, "while thanking you just the same for the chance."

"You can put me down for one share, to be paid for in poetry," said the Poet, with a wink at the Idiot.

"You'll never make good," said the Idiot, slyly.

"And I," said the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally imbibes, "shall be most happy to take five shares to be paid for in advice and high-balls. Moreover, if your company needs good-will to establish its enterprise, you may count upon me for unlimited credit."

"Oh, as for that," said the Idiot, "I have plenty of good-will. Even Mr. Pedagog supplies me with more of it than I deserve, though by no means with all that I desire."

"That good-will is yours as an individual, Mr. Idiot," returned the School-master. "As a corporation, however, I cannot permit you to trade upon me even for that. Your value is, in my eyes, entirely too fluctuating."

"And it is in the fluctuating stock that the great fortunes are made, Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "As an individual I appreciate your good-will. As a corporation I am soulless, without emotions, and so cherish no disappointments over your refusal. I think if the scheme goes through it will be successful, and I fully expect to see the day when Idiot Preferred will be selling as high, if not higher, than Steel, and leaving utterly behind any other industrial that ever was known, copper or rope."

"If, like the railways, you could issue betterment bonds you might do very well," said the Doctor. "I think ten million dollars spent in bettering you might bring you up to par."

"Or a consolidated first-mortgage bond," remarked the Bibliomaniac. "Consolidate the Idiot with a man like Chamberlain or the German Emperor, and issue a five-million-dollar mortgage on the result, and you might find people who'd take those bonds at seventy-five."

"You might if they were a dollar bond printed on cartridge-paper," said Mr. Pedagog. "Then purchasers could paper their walls with them."

"Rail on," said the Idiot. "I can stand it. When I begin paying quarterly dividends at a ten-per-cent. rate you'll wish you had come in."

"I don't know about that," said Mr. Pedagog. "It would entirely depend."

"On what?" queried the Idiot, unwarily.

"On whether that ten per cent. was declared upon your own estimate of your value or upon ours. On yours it would be fabulous; on ours—oh, well, what is the use of saying anything more about it. We are not going in it, and that's an end to it."

"Well, I'll go in it if you change your scheme," said the Doctor. "If instead of an Idiot Publishing Company you will try to float yourself as a Consolidated Gas Company you may count on me to take a controlling interest."

"I will submit the proposition to my friends," said the Idiot, calmly. "It would be something to turn out an honest gas company, which I should, of course, try to be, but I am afraid the public will not accept it. There is little demand for laughing-gas, and, besides, they would fear to intrust you with a controlling interest for fear that you might blow the product out and the bills up—coining millions by mere inflation. They've heard of you, Doctor, and they know that is the sort of thing you'd be likely to do."

V
University Extension

"I was surprised and gratified last evening, Mr. Idiot," observed the School-master as breakfast was served, "to see you at the University Extension Lecture. I did not know that you admitted the necessity of further instruction in any matter pertaining to human knowledge."

"I don't know that I do admit the necessity," returned the Idiot. "Sometimes when I take an inventory of the contents of my mind it seems to me that about everything I need is there."

"There you go again!" said the Bibliomaniac. "Why do you persist in your refusal to allow any one to get a favorable impression concerning you? Mr. Pedagog unbends sufficiently to tell you that you have at last done something which he can commend, and you greet him with an Idiotism which is practically a rebuff."

"Very well said," observed the School-master, with an acquiescent nod. "I came to this table this morning encouraged to believe that this young man was beginning to see the error of his ways, and I must confess to a great enough interest in him to say that I was pleased at that encouragement. I saw him at a lecture on literature at the Lyceum Hall last evening, and he appeared to be interested, and yet this morning he seems to show that he is utterly incorrigible. May I ask, sir, why you attended that lecture if, as you say, your mind is already sufficiently well furnished?"

"Certainly you may ask that question," replied the Idiot. "I went to that lecture to have my impressions confirmed, that is all. I have certain well-defined notions concerning University Extension, and I wished to see if they were correct. I found that they were."

"The lecture was not upon University Extension, but upon Romanticism, and it was a most able discourse," retorted Mr. Pedagog.

"Very likely," said the Idiot. "I did not hear it. I did not want to hear it. I have my own ideas concerning Romanticism, which do not need confirmation or correction. I have already confirmed and corrected them. I went to see the audience and not to hear Professor Peterkin exploding theories."

"It is a pity the chair you occupied was wasted upon you," snapped Mr. Pedagog.

"I agree with you," said the Idiot. "I could have got a much better view of the audience if I had been permitted to sit on the stage, but Professor Peterkin needed all that for his gestures. However, I saw enough from where I sat to confirm my impression that University Extension is not so much of a public benefit as a social fad. There was hardly a soul in the audience who could not have got all that Professor Peterkin had to tell him out of his books; there was hardly a soul in the audience who could not have afforded to pay one dollar at least for the seat he occupied; there was not a soul in the audience who had paid more than ten cents for his seat or her seat, and those for whose benefit the lecture was presumably given, the ten-cent people, were crowded out. The lectures themselves are not instructive—Professor Peterkin's particularly—except in so far as it is instructive to hear what Professor Peterkin thinks on this or that subject, and his desire to be original forces him to cook up views which no one else ever held, with the result that what he says is most interesting and proper to be presented to the attention of a discriminating audience, but not proper to be presented to an audience that is supposed to come there to receive instruction."

"You have just said that you did not listen to the lecture. How do you know that what you say is true?" put in the Bibliomaniac.

"I know Professor Peterkin," said the Idiot.

"Does he know you?" sneered Mr. Pedagog.

"I don't think he would remember me if you should speak my name in his presence," observed the Idiot, calmly. "But that is easily accounted for. The Professor never remembers anybody but himself."

"Well, I admit," said Mr. Pedagog, "that the Professor's lectures were rather advanced for the comprehension of a person like the Idiot, nevertheless it was an enjoyable occasion, and I doubt if the fulminations of our friend here will avail against University Extension."

"You speak a sad truth," said the Idiot. "Social fads are impervious to fulmination, as Solomon might have said had he thought of it. As long as a thing is a social fad it will thrive, and, on the whole, perhaps it ought to thrive. Anything which gives society something to think about has its value, and the mere fact that it makes society think is proof of that value."

"We seem to be in a philosophic frame of mind this morning," said Mr. Whitechoker.

"We are," returned the Idiot. "That's one thing about University Extension. It makes us philosophic. It has made a stoic of my dear old daddy."

"Oh yes!" cried Mr. Pedagog. "You have a father, haven't you? I had forgotten that."

"Wherein," said the Idiot, "we differ. I haven't forgotten that I have one, and, by-the-way, it is from him that I first heard of University Extension. He lives in a small manufacturing town not many miles from here, and is distinguished in the town because, without being stingy, he lives within his means. He has a way of paying his grocer's bills which makes of him a marked man. He hasn't much more money than he needs, but when the University Extension movement reached the town he was interested. The prime movers in the enterprise went to him and asked him if he wouldn't help it along, dilating upon the benefits which would accrue to those whose education stopped short with graduation from the high-schools. It was most plausible. The notion that for ten cents a lecture the working masses could learn something about art, history, and letters, could gather in something about the sciences, and all that, appealed to him, and while he could afford it much more ill than the smart people, the four hundred of the town, he chipped in. He paid fifty dollars and was made an honorary manager. He was proud enough of it, too, and he wrote a long, enthusiastic letter to me about it. It was a great thing, and he hoped the State, which had been appealed to to help the movement along, would take a hand in it. 'If we educate the masses to understand and to appreciate the artistic, the beautiful,' he wrote, 'we need have little fear for the future. Ignorance is the greatest foe we have to contend against in our national development, and it is the only thing that can overthrow a nation such as ours is.' And then what happened? Professor Peterkin came along and delivered ten or a dozen lectures. The masses went once or twice and found the platform occupied by a man who talked to them about Romanticism and Realism; who told them that Dickens was trash; who exalted Tolstoi and Ibsen; but who never let them into the secret of what Romanticism was, and who kept them equally in the dark as to the significance of Realism. They also found the best seats in the lecture-hall occupied by the smart set in full evening-dress, who talked almost as much and as loudly as did Professor Peterkin. The masses did not even learn manners at Professor Peterkin's first and second lectures, and the third and fourth found them conspicuous by their absence. All they learned was that they were ignorant, and that other people were better than they, and what my father learned was that he had subscribed fifty dollars to promote a series of social functions for the diversion of the four hundred and the aggrandizement of Professor Peterkin. He started in for what might be called Romanticism, and he got a Realism that he did not like in less time than it takes to tell of it, and to-day in that town University Extension is such a fad that when, some weeks ago, the swell club of that place talked of appointing Thursday evening as its club night, it was found to be impossible, for the reason that it might interfere with the attendance upon the University Extension lectures. That, Mr. Pedagog, is a matter of history and can be proven, and last night's audience confirmed the impression which I had formed from what my father had told me. Professor Peterkin's lectures are interesting to you, a school-master, but they are pure Greek to me, who would like to know more about letters. I would gather more instruction from your table-talk in an hour than I could from Professor Peterkin's whole course."

"You flatter me," said Mr. Pedagog.

"No," returned the Idiot. "If you knew how little the ignorant gain from Peterkin you would not necessarily call it flattery if one should say he learned more from your conversation over a griddle-cake."

"You misconceive the whole situation, I think, nevertheless," said Mr. Whitechoker. "As I understand it, supplementary lectures, and examinations based on them, are held after the lectures, when the practical instruction is given with great thoroughness."

"I'm glad you spoke of that," said the Idiot. "I had forgotten that part of it. Professor Peterkin received pay for his lectures, which dealt in theories only; plain Mr. Barton, who delivered the supplementary lectures, got nothing. Professor Peterkin taught nothing, but he represented University Extension. Plain Mr. Barton did the work and represented nothing. Both reached society. Neither reached the masses. In my native town plain Mr. Barton's supplementary lectures, which were simply an effort to unravel the Peterkin complications, were attended by the same people in smaller crowds—people of social standing who were curious enough to devote an hour a week to an endeavor to find out the meaning of what Professor Peterkin had told them at the function the week before. The students examined were mostly ladies, and I happen to know that in a large proportion they were ladies whose husbands could have afforded to pay Professor Peterkin his salary ten times over as a private tutor."

"As I look at it," said Mr. Pedagog, gravely, "it does not make much difference to whom your instruction is given, so long as it instructs. What if these lectures do interest those who are comparatively well off? Your society woman may be as much in need of an extended education as your factory girl. The University Extension idea is to convey knowledge to people who would not otherwise get it. It simply sets out to improve minds. If the social mind needs improvement, why not improve it? Why condemn a system because it does not discriminate in the minds selected for improvement?"

"I don't condemn a system which sets out to improve minds irrespective of conditions," replied the Idiot. "But I should most assuredly condemn a man, or a set of men, who induced me to subscribe to a bread fund for the poor and who afterwards expended that money on cream-cakes for the Czar of Russia. The fact that the Czar of Russia wanted the cream-cakes and was willing to accept them would not affect my feelings in the matter, though I have no doubt the people in charge of the fund would find themselves far more conspicuous for having departed from the original idea. Some of them might be knighted for it if the Czar happened to be passionately fond of cream-cakes."

"Then, having attacked this system, what would you have? Would you have University Extension stop?" asked the Bibliomaniac.

"Not at all," returned the Idiot. "Anything which can educate society is a good thing, but I should change the name of it from University Extension to Social Expansion, and I should compel those whose minds were broadened by it to pay the bills."

"But as yet you have failed to hit the nail on the head," persisted the Bibliomaniac. "The masses can attend these lectures if they wish to, and on your own statement they don't. You don't seem to consider that point, or, if you do, you don't meet it."

"I don't think it necessary to meet it," said the Idiot. "Though I will say that if you were one of the masses—a girl, say, with one dress, threadbare, poor, and ill-fitting, and possessed of a natural bit of pride—you would find little pleasure in attending a lecture your previous education does not permit of your comprehending, and sitting through an evening with a lot of finely dressed, smart folk, with their backs turned towards you. The plebeians have some pride, my dear Bibliomaniac, and they are decidedly averse to mixing with the swells. They would like to be educated, but they don't care to be snubbed for the privilege of being mystified by a man like Professor Peterkin, even for so small a sum as ten cents an evening."

VI
Social Expansion

"We were talking about University Extension the other day, Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot, as the School-master folded up the newspaper and put it in his pocket, "and I, as you remember, suggested that it might better be called Social Expansion."

"Did you?" said Mr. Pedagog, coldly. "I don't remember much about it. I rarely make a note of anything you may say."

"Well, I did suggest the change of name, whether your memory is retentive or not, and I have been thinking the matter over a good deal since, and I think I've got hold of an idea," returned the Idiot.

"In that case," said the Bibliomaniac, "we would better lock the door. If you have really got hold of an idea you should be very careful not to let it get away from you."

"No danger of that," said the Idiot, with a smile. "I have it securely locked up here," tapping his forehead.

"It must be lonesome," said Mr. Pedagog.

"And rather uncomfortable—if it is a real idea," observed the Doctor. "An idea in the Idiot's mind must feel somewhat as a tall, stout Irish maid feels when she goes to her bedroom in one of those Harlem flat-houses."

"You men are losing a great opportunity," said the Idiot, with a scornful glance at the three professional gentlemen. "The idea of your following the professions of pedagogy, medicine, and literature, when the three of you combined could make a fortune as an incarnate comic paper. I don't see why you don't make a combination like those German bands that play on the street corners, and go about from door to door, and crack your jokes just as they crack their music. I am sure you'd take, particularly in front of barber-shops."

"It would be hard on the comic papers," said the Poet, who was getting a little unpopular with his fellow-boarders because of his tendency, recently developed, to take the Idiot's part in the breakfast-table discussions. "They might be so successful that the barber-shops, instead of taking the comic papers for their customers to read, would employ one or more of them to sit in the middle of the room and crack jokes aloud."

"We couldn't rival the comic papers though," said the Doctor, wishing to save his dignity by taking the bull by the horns. "We might do the jokes well enough, but the comic papers are chiefly pictorial."

"You'd be pictorial enough," said the Idiot. "Wasn't it you, Mr. Pedagog, that said the Doctor here looked like one of Cruikshank's physicians, or as if he had stepped out of Dickens's pages, or something like it?"

"I never said anything of the sort!" cried the School-master, wrathfully; "and you know I didn't."

"Who was it said that?" asked the Idiot, innocently, looking about the table. "It couldn't have been Mr. Whitechoker, and I know it wasn't the Poet or my Genial Friend who occasionally imbibes. Mr. Pedagog denies it; I didn't say it; Mrs. Pedagog wouldn't say it. That leaves only two of us—the Bibliomaniac and the Doctor himself. I don't think the Doctor would make a personal remark of that kind, and—well, there is but one conclusion. Mr. Bibliomaniac, I am surprised."

"What?" roared the Bibliomaniac, glaring at the Idiot. "Do you mean to fasten the impertinence on me?"

"Far from it," returned the Idiot, meekly. "Very far from it. It is fate, sir, that has done that—the circumstantial evidence against you is strong; but then, mercifully enough, circumstantial evidence is not permitted to hang a man."

"Now see here, Mr. Idiot," said the Bibliomaniac, firmly and impressively, "I want you to distinctly understand that I am not going to have you put words into my mouth that I never uttered. I—"

"Pray, don't attack me," said the Idiot. "I haven't made any charge against you. I only asked who could have said that the Doctor looked like a creation of Cruikshank. I couldn't have said it, because I don't think it. Mr. Pedagog denies it. In fact, every one here has a clear case of innocence excepting yourself, and I don't believe you said it, only the chain of circumstance—"

"Oh, hang your chain of circumstance!" interrupted the Bibliomaniac.

"It is hung," said the Idiot, "and it appears to make you very uncomfortable. However, as I was saying, I think I have got hold of an idea involving a truly philanthropic and by no means selfish scheme of Social Expansion."

"Heigho!" sighed Mr. Pedagog. "I sometimes think that if I had not the honor to be the husband of our landlady I'd move away from here. Your views, sir, are undermining my constitution."

"You only think so, Mr. Pedagog," replied the Idiot. "You are simply going through a process of intellectual reconstruction at my hands. You feel exactly as a man feels who has been shut up in the dark for years and suddenly finds himself in a flood of sunlight. I am doing with you as an individual what I would have society do for mankind at large—in other words, while I am working for individual expansion upon the raw material I find here, I would have society buckle down to the enlargement of itself by the improvement of those outside of itself."

"If you swim in water as well as you do in verbiage," said the Bibliomaniac, "you must be able to go three or four strokes without sinking."

"Oh, as for that, I can swim like a duck," said the Idiot. "You can't sink me."

"I fancied not," observed Mr. Pedagog, with a smile at his own joke. "You are so light I wonder, indeed, that you don't rise up into space, anyhow."

"What a delightful condition of affairs that suggestion opens up!" said the Idiot, turning to the Poet. "If I were you I'd make a poem on that. Something like this, for instance:

"I am so very, very light
That gravitation curbs not me.
I rise up through the atmosphere
Till all the world I plainly see.

"I dance about among the clouds,
An airy, happy, human kite.
The breezes toss me here and there,
To my exceeding great delight.

"And when I would return to sup,
To breakfast, or perchance to dine,
I haul myself once more to earth
By tugging on a piece of twine."

Mr. Pedagog grinned broadly at this.

"You aren't entirely without your good points," he said. "If we ever accept your comic-paper idea we'll have to rely on you for the nonsense poetry."

"Thank you," said the Idiot. "I'll help. If I had a man like you to give me the suggestions I could make a fortune out of poetry. The only trouble is I have to quarrel with you before I can get you to give me a suggestion, and I despise bickering."

"So do I," returned Mr. Pedagog. "Let's give up bickering and turn our attention to—er—Social Extension, is it?"

"Yes—or Social Expansion," said the Idiot. "Some years ago the world was startled to hear that in the city of New York there were not more than four hundred people who were entitled to social position, and, as I understand it, as time has progressed the number has still further diminished. Last year the number was only one hundred and fifty, and, as I read the social news of to-day, not more than twenty-five people are now beyond all question in the swim. At dinners, balls, functions of all sorts, you read the names of these same twenty-five over and over again as having been present. Apparently no others attended—or, if they did, they were not so indisputably entitled to be present that their names could be printed in the published accounts. Now all of this shows that society is dying out, and that if things keep on as they are now going it will not be many years before we shall become a people without society, a nation of plebeians."

"Your statement so far is lucid and logical," said Mr. Pedagog, who did not admire society—so called—and who did not object to the goring of an ox in which he was not personally interested.

"Well, why is this social contraction going on?" asked the Idiot. "Clearly because Social Expansion is not an accepted fact. If it were, society would grow. Why does it not grow? Why are its ranks not augmented? There is raw material enough. You would like to get into the swim; so would I. But we don't know how. We read books of etiquette, but they are far from being complete. I think I make no mistake when I say they are utterly valueless. They tell us no more than the funny journal tells us when it says:

"'Never eat pease with a spoon;
Never eat pie with a knife;
Never put salt on a prune;
Never throw crumbs at your wife.'"

They tell most of us what we all knew before. They tell us not to wear our hats in the house; they tell us all the obvious things, but the subtleties of how to get into society they do not tell us. The comic papers give us some idea of how to behave in society. We know from reading the funny papers that a really swell young man always leans against a mantel-piece when he is calling; that the swell girl sits on a comfortable divan with her feet on a tiger-skin rug, and they converse in epigram. Sometimes the epigram is positively rude; when it is not rude it is so dull that no one wonders that the tiger's head on the rug represents the tiger as yawning. But, while this is instructive, it teaches us how to behave on special occasions only. You or I might call upon a young woman who did not sit on a divan, who had no tiger-skin rug to put her feet on, and whose parlor had a mantel-piece against which we could not lean comfortably. What are we to do then? As far as they go, the funny papers are excellent, but they don't go far enough. They give us attractive pictures of fashionable dinners, but it is always of the dinner after the game course. Some of us would like to know how society behaves while the soup is being served. We know that after the game course society girls reach across the table and clink wine-glasses with young men, but we do not know what they do before they get to the clink stage. Nowhere is this information given. Etiquette books are silent on the subject, and though I have sought everywhere for information, I do not know to this day how many salted almonds one may consume at dinner without embarrassing one's hostess. Now, if I can't find out, the million can't find out. Wherefore, instead of shutting themselves selfishly up and, by so doing, forcing society finally into dissolution, why cannot some of these people who know what is what give object-lessons to the million; educate them in savoir-faire?

"Last summer there was a play put on at one of our theatres in which there was a scene at a race-track. At one side was a tally-ho coach. For the first week the coach was an utterly valueless accessory, because the people on it were the ordinary supers in the employ of the theatre. They did not know how to behave on a coach, and nobody was interested. The management were suddenly seized with a bright idea. They invited several swell young men who knew how things were done on coaches to come and do these things on their coach. The young men came and imparted a realism to the scene that made that coach the centre of attraction. People who went to that play departed educated in coach etiquette. Now there lies my scheme in a nutshell. If these twenty-five, the Old Guard of society, which dines but never surrenders, will give once a week a social function in some place like Madison Square Garden, to which the million may go merely as spectators, not as participators, is there any doubt that they would fail to be instructed? The Garden will seat eight or ten thousand people. Suppose, for an instance, that a dozen of your best exponents of what is what were to give a dinner in the middle of the arena, with ten thousand people looking on. Do you mean to say that of all that vast audience no one would learn thereby how to behave at a dinner?"

"It is a great scheme," said the Doctor.

"It is!" said the Idiot, "and I venture to say that a course of, say, twelve social functions given in that way would prove so popular that the Garden would turn away every night twice as many people as it could accommodate."

"It would be instructive, no doubt," said the Bibliomaniac; "but how would it expand society? Would you have examinations?"

"Most assuredly," said the Idiot. "At the end of the season I should have a rigid examination of all who chose to apply. I would make them dine in the presence of a committee of expert diners, I would have them pass a searching examination in the Art of Wearing a Dress Suit, in the Science of Entering a Drawing-room, in the Art of Behavior at Afternoon Teas, and all the men who applied should also be compelled to pass a physical examination as an assurance that they were equal to the task of getting an ice for a young lady at a ball."

"Society would get to be too inclusive and would cease to be exclusive," suggested Mr. Whitechoker.

"I think not," said the Idiot. "I should not give a man or a woman the degree of B.S. unless he or she had passed an examination of one hundred per cent."

"B.S.?" queried Mr. Pedagog.

"Yes," returned the Idiot. "Bachelor of Society—a degree which, once earned, should entitle one to recognition as a member of the upper ten anywhere in Christendom."

"It is superb!" cried Mr. Pedagog, enthusiastically.

"Yes," said the Idiot. "At ten cents a function it would beat University Extension out of sight, and, further, it would preserve society. If we lose society we lose caste, and, worse than all, our funny men would have to go out of business, for there would be no fads or Willieboys left to ridicule."

VII
A Beggar's Hand-book

"Mr. Idiot," said the Poet one morning, as the waffles were served, "you are an inventive genius. Why don't you invent an easy way to make a fortune? The trouble with most methods of making money is that they involve too much labor."

"I have thought of that," said the Idiot. "And yet the great fortunes have been made in a way which involved very little labor, comparatively speaking. You, for instance, probably work harder over a yard of poetry that brings you in ten dollars than any of our great railroad magnates have over a mile of railroad which has brought them in a million."

"Which simply proves that it is ideas that count rather than labor," said the Poet.

"Not exactly," said the Idiot. "If you put a hundred ideas into a quatrain you will get less money for it than you would for a two-volume epic in which you have possibly only 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 that makes wealth. I believe that if you literary men would show more nerve force and spare the public the infliction of what you call your ideas, you would make more money."

"How would you show nerve in writing?" queried the Bibliomaniac.

"If I knew I'd write and make my fortune," said the Idiot. "Unfortunately, I don't know how one can show nerve in writing, unless it be in taking hold of some particularly popular idiosyncrasy of mankind and treating it so contemptuously that every one would want to mob you. If you could get the public mad enough at you to want to mob you they'd read everything you'd write, simply to nourish their wrath, and you'd soon be cutting coupons for a living, and could then afford to take up more ideas—coupon-cutters can afford theories. For my own part, one reason why I do not myself take up literature for a profession is that I have neither the nerve nor the coupons. I'd probably run along in the rut like 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 successes, with the result that I am moderately successful only. It's the same way in every line of business. Precedent guides in all things, but where occasionally you find a man courageous enough to cast precedent to the winds, one of two things happens. Either fortune or ruin follows. Hence, the thing to do if you want to make a fortune is to eliminate the possibility of ruin as far as may be. You cannot ruin a man who has nothing. He is down on bed-rock, anyhow; so for a receipt for fortune I should say, start a pauper, show your nerve, and you'll make a pile, or you won't make a pile. If you make it you are fortunate. If you fail to make it you are no more unfortunate than you were before you started."

"For plausibility, Mr. Idiot," said Mr. Pedagog, "you are to me a perfect wonder. I do not think that any one can deny, with confidence born of certainty, the truth of your premises, and it must be admitted that your conclusions are based properly upon those premises, and yet your conclusions are almost invariably utterly absurd, if not absolutely grotesque. Here is a man who says, to make a fortune become a beggar!"

"Precisely," said the Idiot. "There is nothing like having a clean slate to work on. If you are not a beggar you have something, and having something promotes caution and tends to destroy nerve. As a beggar you have everything to gain and nothing to lose, so you can plunge. You can swim better in deep water than in the shallow."

"Well," said the Doctor, "enlighten us on this point. You may not know how to show nerve as a writer—in fact, you confess that you don't. How would you show nerve as a beggar? Would you strive to enforce your demands and degenerate into a common highwayman, or would you simply go in for big profits, and ask passers-by for ten dollars instead of ten cents?"

"He'd probably take a bag of dynamite into a millionaire's office and threaten to blow him to pieces if he didn't give him a house and lot," sneered the Bibliomaniac.

"Not at all," said the Idiot. "That's cowardice, not nerve. If I went into a millionaire's office and demanded a million—or a house and lot even—armed with a bag full of newspapers, pretending it held dynamite, it might be more like nerve; but my beggar would do nothing contrary to the law. He'd simply be nervy, that's all—cheeky, perhaps you'd call it. For instance, I believe that if I were to hire in the elevated cars one of those advertising spaces above the windows, and were to place in that space 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 with credit there is practically no limit to the possibilities of fortune. It is simply honest nerve that counts. The beggar who asks you on the street for five cents to keep his family from starving is rebuffed. You don't believe his story, and you know that five cents wouldn't keep a family from starving very long. But the fellow who accosts you frankly for a dime because he is thirsty, and hasn't had a drink for two hours, in nine cases out of ten properly selected ones will get a quarter for his nerve."

"You ought to write a Manual for Beggars," said the Bibliomaniac. "I have no doubt that the Idiot Publishing Company would publish it."

"Yes," said Mr. Pedagog. "A sort of beggar's Don't, for instance. It would be a benefit to all men, as well as a boon to the beggars. That mendicancy is a profession to-day there is no denying, and anything which could make of it a polite calling would be of inestimable value."

"I have had it in mind for some time," said the Idiot, blandly. "I intended to call it Mendicancy Made Easy, or the Beggar's Don't: With Two Chapters on Etiquette for Tramps."

"The chief trouble with such a book I should think," said the Poet, "would be that your beggars and tramps could not afford to buy it."