"
We thanked Jephson for his story, and promised to profit by the moral,
when discovered. Meanwhile, MacShaughnassy said that he knew a story
dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman
to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was: don't have
anything to do with inventions.
Brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a man
plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral. We agreed to hear the
particulars, and judge for ourselves.
"This story," commenced MacShaughnassy, "comes from Furtwangen, a small
town in the Black Forest. There lived there a very wonderful old fellow
named Nicholaus Geibel. His business was the making of mechanical toys,
at which work he had acquired an almost European reputation. He made
rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a cabbage, flap their ears,
smooth their whiskers, and disappear again; cats that would wash their
faces, and mew so naturally that dogs would mistake them for real cats,
and fly at them; dolls, with phonographs concealed within them, that
would raise their hats and say, 'Good morning; how do you do?' and some
that would even sing a song.
"But he was something more than a mere mechanic; he was an artist. His
work was with him a hobby, almost a passion.
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