Told by the Colonel

by W. L. Alden

MY BROTHER ELIJAH.

“I never told you about my brother, the inventor, did I?” asked the Colonel. “Speaking of flying-machines reminds me of him, for he invented seven of them, and one of the lot was a stunning success. Stunned one darky and came very near stunning a whole camp-meeting of darkies. My brother Lije—his name was Elijah—was what you might call a general inventor. He didn’t stick to any one line, such as electricity, for example, but he would invent anything, from a woman’s pocket to a new motive power. He invented a pocket for a woman’s skirt that was warranted never to be found by the most expert pickpocket, and he put the pocket in the skirt of his wife’s dress on trial. She searched for it for about a month—not all the time, you understand, but on an average three or four hours a day—and then gave it up. She said she could always find her usual old-fashioned pocket in the course of a week or ten days, and that was as much time as she could afford to waste on the subject. As for Elijah’s perpetual-motion machines, he invented a new one at least every year, and the loft in our barn was always full of them. Of course they were failures, but that did not discourage Lije. You can’t discourage a born inventor—that is, unless he is in the chemical line and blows himself up with some new kind of dynamite. Lije’s inventions were, to my mind, as smart as those of Edison, but the trouble with them was that for the most part they wouldn’t work. However, they amused him and did no harm to anybody.

“ELIJAH.”

“My brother was not in the least like me in anything. He was short and stout and the best-tempered man in the State. Everybody liked him, especially the darkies, who said that there was no more harm in him than if he was a child. I’ve seen him when he had just accidentally chopped off a finger or had burnt all his hair off, and I never heard him use the smallest swear-word. I never could see why he got married. A man with that sort of heavenly temper doesn’t need the discipline that other folks need, and he was too much absorbed in science to have any time to associate with a wife. He spent nearly all his time in his workshop monkeying with his inventions, and his only companion was a darky boy, about twelve years old, named Aristophanes, who waited on him and was so fond of him that there is nothing that Lije told him to do that Aristophanes wouldn’t do. If Lije had invented a new guillotine and wanted to try it on Aristophanes’ neck, the boy would have consented to have his head chopped off, and would never have doubted that Massa Lije would put it on again without even leaving a scar.

“You were speaking of this new flying-machine that somebody had just invented and that acts on the principle of a kite. ‘Resistance of an inclined plane to the air’ is what you called it, but that means kite, and nothing else. Why, Elijah invented that machine forty years ago, and it was one of his greatest successes, the only one, in fact, that I ever remember his making. When I say that it was successful, I don’t mean to say that it was practicable. It would rise and it would carry a man with it, but it never came into general use, for it was about impossible to get the man down again without killing him. Next to a Swiss excursion steamboat, it was the riskiest mode of locomotion ever invented.

“The way in which Lije’s machine was constructed was very simple. You must have seen what we boys used to call a spider-web kite. If you haven’t, I might as well tell you that it is made with three sticks that cross one another at the same point in about the middle of the kite, or rather a little above the middle, and gave the kite something the shape and look of a big spider-web. Lije was fond of kite-flying, and was always trying to make improvements in kite-building, which were naturally failures, for you can be sure that the millions of boys that have been making kites ever since boys were first invented know a great sight more about kites than any scientific man knows.

“Elijah’s flying-machine was nothing more or less than the biggest spider-web kite that was ever built. The sticks were ash poles an inch in diameter, and they were covered with silk instead of paper. I forget the exact dimensions of the kite, but according to Lije’s calculations it would sustain a hundred and fifty pounds of human being, in addition to its own weight and the weight of its tail. The question of the exact amount of tail that the kite would require gave Lije a good deal of trouble, but he solved it like a man of science by sending up an ordinary kite and finding by experiment how much tail it needed, after which he calculated by the rule of three how much tail to give his flying-machine. In order to get the necessary weight without too great length, the tail of the flying-machine was made of light iron chain, and at the end of it there was an iron hook, so that a lantern could be attached to it at night. As for the string that was to hold the kite, it was about the size of a ship’s signal-halyards, and Lije calculated that it would bear twice the amount of any strain that could possibly be put on it.

“Aristophanes was to make the trial trip, and he was perfectly willing to go, never having the least doubt that Massa Lije would secure him a safe and pleasant trip to the moon or thereabouts. Lije fastened the boy in the centre of the kite, in about the position of some celebrated Scotchman—St. Andrew, wasn’t it?—whose picture is in Fox’s ‘Book of Martyrs.’ Aristophanes’ arms and legs were lashed to the kite sticks, and he had a sort of rest for each foot, so as to take the strain from off the lashings. In order to make him comfortable, Lije fastened a pillow under the boy’s head, so that he could go to sleep in case he should feel sleepy, which he nearly always did. If Aristophanes could only have managed to take his dinner with him and eat it in the air, he would have been about as happy as a darky can be, and an average darky can hold more happiness to the square inch than any white man.