the very force employed to produce the sound which starts the action of his machine requires the consumption of some description of fuel, either animal, vegetable, or mineral, for its generation, and the resulting action of his engine is dependent upon an original expenditure of power.
Whether Mr. Keely can ever make a machine, upon the principle in question, which will be a practical and economical motor I have the grayest doubts, but it is time that those interested in his schemes should make themselves acquainted with the fundamental laws and facts of accepted physics, and they will then find that what they consider mysteries of inscrutable power are in plain English nothing more nor less than interesting experiments in acoustics and mechanics.
In reading the note of Robert Waters in which he wonders what there can be in the manufacture of literature to induce so many people in practical America to drudge away at so notoriously an ill-paid profession, it occurs to me that he has left out one not uncommon cause.
Years ago I had a boy friend with a face like an angel, and a poetic soul which I firmly believed would make him famous. (It hasn't yet, although, just out of Harvard as he is, it has brought him a call to a two-thousand-dollar-per-annum pastorate.) As a boy I looked up to him, admired him, and mourned that I could do nothing to make the world the better for my having lived in it. My friend wrote poetry which was printed. I saw it myself in type, and in the sight I also saw the first crevice of a rift which would surely grow into a crevasse between us if I did not succeed in struggling to his side. So I tried. With my trial I had still some discretion. I did not send it to the Atlantic Monthly, but to a local paper, and "saw myself in print."
Growing bolder, I tried the Youth's Companion, which not only accepted but paid for a number of my "poems," of one or two of which I always had a lurking suspicion that they were taken by way of encouragement, because they thought that better things might come by and by. I never saw them in print, at all events. I was not satisfied with that success: it did not reach my aim, for, like my friend, I still dreamed not of fame, but of doing a little good somewhere. Meanwhile, money gave out, physique would not admit of getting more for educational purposes, so my friend went to Harvard and I to business; and as I wondered what there was for me to do besides bread-winning, which was hard enough, I wrote, as an experiment, an article on natural history for boys. To my surprise, I received ten dollars for it. I wrote several more before it occurred to me that here was my field, that whatever good I was to do in the world was to be applied to the young world now in bud. So to that I turned my pen. How much I have done it is not for me to say. The childish letters which my first long serial brought out gave me more pleasure than any success I had yet achieved. It gave me more than the check did, for that was not only small, but the accompanying letter (which reached me when the story had nearly run its course) informed me that I had parted with the copyright, which I had not had the slightest idea of doing. (I believe as a book it was a juvenile success.)
Thus I found my life-work,—not how I could earn the most money or fame, but my "mission," which every man has, whether he regards or disregards it. Thus I work at my commercial desk by day, and at night, once or twice a week when the day's toil has been lightest, I sit down at my type-writer and do what I may towards making life pleasanter for others. And because I
