“They think I want to get the land round here for nothing. Boy, when a real man wants to make money, he takes something out of Nature that’s worthless, or worth little—or perhaps it’s man’s waste—and makes that thing, after a dose of brains and a civilized dress, worth good money. But a lazy man jumps a lot of land and sits down to listen to his neighbors holler for it. In your time, my son, the people will have their eyes open, and there’ll be no land going that way. Then you’ll have to use your brains to think up new things.”
“Sometimes it seems as if all the new things had been thought up.”
“New things! Why, Billy, if every man should invent a new job there’d still be as many coming. Look about you and see how many little things need fixing. And who has made use of sawdust? We burn millions of dollars’ worth every day. They’ll be making hot cross buns out of it some day. Look at the thistles, nettles, base ores, the millions burned up in sewage. Think of the untended, burned, and rotting forests,—billions go that way. Think of the deserts even along foggy sea coasts,—why, when we really use our brains we’ll condense that fog, irrigate with it, and raise pineapples where the horned toad now preëmpts all the real estate.”
He stopped a moment, rolled his cigar in his fingers, and looked out of the open door; while Billy, breathless, waited for him to go on.
“Think of the tide. Billy, men of the twenty-first century will run nearly everything in the world that calls for power by the force of the tide. They’ll turn it into acres of light, and heat, and force their garden truck with it. They’ll cook with it, grind with it, carry it up mountains and down into mines; drive with it, fly with it, and laugh at us for troglodytes.”
Both laughed softly, and Mr. Smith presently rose. “I guess I’ll go down to the grade and kill time there. May Nell might come again; she doesn’t have as much respect for business as you do, Billy.”
“Perhaps it would be the same with me if you were my father, though I don’t see—how—” He hesitated, wondering what life would mean with such a man for father.
“Perhaps so. Well, lie low. And don’t let the girls know you’re here.”
With that Mr. Smith got into the machine and chugged off down the hill.