The man of knowledge inspected it closely, and carefully studied every motion. Then he thoughtfully stroked his beard, which was long and luxuriant (perhaps from excess of knowledge) to the point of aggressiveness.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, yes. Seems pretty clever: ingenious, too; works all right; labor-saving, no doubt of that. Might be a very good thing; but I’m afraid, Mr. Rolf, I’m afraid there’s no money in it. In fact,” for you see the man of knowledge had had other interviews with inventors, and he knew that things must be broken to them gently, “in fact, there’s a what-you-call-‘em already in the office, enough like yours to be its own brother.”
“Impossible! I never heard of it!” stammered the inventor.
“Oh! I don’t suppose you did; case of great minds thinking alike, you know. Bless your soul, it happens every day! Not the same machine, you know,” with an emphasis as if it might possibly have been the same something else; “but like it; just enough like it for yours to be an infringement on the patent, if the patent was worth anything, which it ain’t.”
“Then my invention is surely not the same,” said poor Leppel, in his labored English; for, though he had twice helped to elect a President, he had lived in America only ten years. “Have you not already said it was good and labor-saving?”
“Oh, it’s all that,” said the man of knowledge easily; “but the fact is, it didn’t pay. It was tried, you know. The man who owned it,—not the inventor, who sold it for a song and was happy ever after, as the story-books say,—but the man who bought it—well, he was pretty warm about the pockets, so he did some extensive advertising, and started up his works in fine style; but the machines cost like fun to make, especially at first; if they had taken, you know, he could have run things on a bigger scale, and so made ‘em cheaper; but they didn’t take. They save muscle, of course; but you see most of us have muscle, and very few of us money. That’s about the English of it, I guess. If they’d saved time, now, or money, ’twould have been different.”
“What became of him?” asked Leppel gloomily.
“The inventor? don’t know; clever fellow, though, ought to succeed at something; maybe not the first thing he tried, but something. Oh! you mean the holder of the patent? Failed, and blew his brains out afterwards; can’t say but it served him right, either.”
“It served him quite right,” cried the inventor fiercely; “he took advantage of the other man’s necessities”—
“But we all do that, you know, Mr. Rolf,” said the man of knowledge. “I never came across a patent yet that was run on Gospel principles. What I blame this fellow for is for letting himself go before he examined into things. Pen and ink are cheap, and arithmetic taught for nothing; and he ought to have known human nature well enough to see that he hadn’t struck a paying job. Well, don’t be discouraged; go home and invent something that is cheap to make, and knocks Father Time into the middle of next week—some improvement in the telegraph, for instance, so a man can hear yesterday how stocks stood day after to-morrow—and you’ll make a fortune yet. Good-night. Oh, don’t mention it! I’ve really enjoyed our little talk; took me back twenty years.”