That is not putting it too strongly—he can do almost anything he seriously turns his hand to. After what I have seen him accomplish, there are few things I would deem it hopeless for him to attempt. Our stage magicians are at their wits’ end to devise some new trick; but he invents a thousand a day—the poorest more wonderful than their masterpiece. Now there’s his own life preserver, for instance—a ridiculous little affair in something like thirty pieces; the simplest thing, yet of almost infinite uses. It is, among many other remarkable qualities, the greatest preservative known. An article so ephemeral that a breath of air would whisk it away, so perishable that not all the Arctic ice could save it, can by this means be kept a thousand years—aye, or ten thousand, for that matter—as good as new. Yes, a man’s very speech may become visible and eternal—all because my friend once did a little conjuring for a Greek, who raised most remarkable harvests from seed our florists never handle. I don’t know just where it does come from nowadays—for we still see that sort of crop once in a while. Perhaps Cadmus himself was a politician, and the dragon’s teeth are an heirloom in the family.
Those early conjurings are not more astounding than the new ones he is constantly devising. Nowadays he can sit down in Washington or London or Berlin, and, by a few taps on a table, turn a million men into a machine for destruction. He will take your ear in New York and hold it to the lips of your friend in Chicago, and then make it as easy for the Chicagoan to hear what you say in reply. Your voice, which, so far as any ability of yours goes, is lost forever as soon as spilled, he can bottle up so perfectly that your great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren shall listen to what you said two hundred years before they were born, and hear it in your very tones. You see, my friend is making life a good deal larger, and death a good deal smaller—and he is not done yet!
But I should be. There is simply no use trying to enumerate his magic, for it has no end. Besides, you can get a much better notion of his powers by watching him than thus at second hand from me. But how are you going to find him, when he doesn’t advertise? Why, of course! How stupid of me to have forgotten to tell you that his name is—Thought.
The Silver Omelet.
THE PATIO PROCESS AT GUANAJUATO