When all this was told at the Rogers's breakfast-table next morning, Mr. Rogers could not help laughing heartily. He said his sister valued the chairs far above their real worth, though of course that did not excuse us for sawing out the rounds.
"But as for patenting your invention, boys," said he, "you need not trouble yourselves. It has been tried."
"How can it have been tried?" said Phaeton.
"As a great many others are," said his father. "By being stolen first. The reason why our worthy chief engineer kept putting you off, was because he thought it was a good invention and wanted to appropriate it. He had a model built, and applied for a patent through lawyer Stevens, from whom I have the information. The application was rejected by the Patent Office, and he had just received notice of it when you called on him yesterday, and found him so surly. His model cost him forty dollars, the Patent Office fee on a rejected application is fifteen dollars, and he had to pay his lawyer something besides. You can guess at the lawyer's fee, and the express company's charge for taking the model and drawings to Washington, and then reckon up how much his dishonesty probably cost him."
"But what puzzles me," said Ned, "is the rejection. That's such a splendid invention, I should think they would have given it a patent right away."
"It does seem so," said Mr. Rogers, who never liked to discourage the boys by pointing out the fatal defects in their contrivances; "but the Commissioner probably had some good reason for it. A great many applications are rejected, for one cause or another."
Phaeton had suddenly ceased to take any part or interest in the conversation, and Ned observed that he was cutting his bread and butter into very queer shapes. One was the profile of a chair; another was a small cylinder, notched on the end.
As soon as breakfast was over, Phaeton took his hat and disappeared. He went up to his aunt's house, and asked to see the mutilated chairs.
"I think they can be mended," said he.
"Of course they can," said his aunt. "The cabinetmaker can put in new rounds, but those wouldn't be the old rounds, and he'd be obliged to take the chairs apart, more or less, to get them in. I don't want anything new about them, and I don't want them weakened by being pulled apart. Unless they are the same old chairs, every splinter of them, that stood in Grandfather's dining-room, they can have no value for me."