“It happened in this way. I was an agent in the general show business, and was collecting an opera company for a friend of mine who was going to open in Chicago. I had come across a first-class tenor—found him in a country church choir in Germany—and was bringing him home with me under a contract, when he and I took that ride on that Berlin electric road. He was a careless sort of chap, and he sat down in a corner of the car where the electricity had been leaking and the seat was pretty wet.”
“I never knew before,” remarked the young man, “that electricity could make a seat wet.”
“Probably not,” retorted the Colonel. “I should judge that there might be a right smart lot of things that you mightn’t know. Most of these gentlemen here, however, have probably heard that nowadays electricity is put up for use in bottles and metallic cans. It stands to reason that anything capable of being put into a bottle is capable of leaking, and wetting whatever it leaks on. If there is anybody here who knows more about bottles than I do, I’m ready to let him tell this story.
“As I was saying, my man sat down in a sort of pool of electric fluid, and sat there for about half an hour. He was wearing in the fob-pocket of his trousers a cheap silver watch. I had given it to him so that he might get some exercise and prevent himself from getting too fat. He never suspected my motive, but he tired himself all out winding it up for two hours every night. Now you may not believe it, but I give you my word that the electricity completely dissolved that watch-case and deposited the silver around the man’s waist. He didn’t find it out till night, and you never saw a man so scared as when he found that there was a band about four inches wide silver-plated all round his waist. The doctor told him that the only possible way of getting it off would be to dissolve it with acid, but that the acid would eat clean through to his spine and injure his voice. So my tenor had to let bad enough alone, and be satisfied with another ten-and-sixpenny gymnasium that I gave him to mollify his feelings.
“We came over on the Arizona, and it got around during the passage that my man was silver-plated. There was a custom-house spy on board, and it happened that after the tenor had sworn that he had nothing dutiable with him, the inspector ordered him to strip and be personally examined. Of course when this was done it was discovered that he was silver-plated, and he was held for duty under the general heading in the tariff of ‘all other articles, silver-plated, or in whole, and not elsewhere enumerated,’ and taxed fifty per cent ad valorem and fined two hundred and fifty dollars for failing to declare that he was plated. He couldn’t pay and I wouldn’t pay, and so he was locked up in a bonded warehouse, and I went to consult my lawyer.
“I laid all the facts before him, and told him I would pay him handsomely if he could get my man out of the custom-house without paying either duty or fine. Now, the lawyer knew the tariff from beginning to end, and if any man could help me I knew he could. He didn’t promise anything at first, but he discussed the question by and large and in all its bearings.
“‘I’m afraid,’ said he, ‘that there is no hope of getting your friend out without paying duty, but we may succeed in having him classified so as to make the duty very low. For instance, you say the man is a professional singer. Now, we might have him classed as a musical instrument and taxed forty-five per cent ad valorem. By the bye, what did you agree to pay him?’
“‘I agreed to pay him,’ says I, ‘a hundred dollars per week.’
“‘That’s bad,’ says the lawyer. ‘A hundred dollars a week is fifty-two hundred per year, which is about the interest at six per cent on eighty-seven thousand dollars. You wouldn’t like to pay forty-three or four thousand dollars duty on him.’