_"This," said the Franciscan, "is my Automaton, who at the proper time
will speak, answer whatsoever question I may ask, and reveal all secret
knowledge to me." He smiled as he laid his hand affectionately on the
iron skull that topped the pedestal._
_The youth gazed open-mouthed, first at the head and then at the Friar.
"But it's iron!" he whispered. "The head is iron, good father."_
_"Iron without, skill within, my son," said Roger Bacon. "It will speak,
at the proper time and in its own manner, for so have I made it. A
clever man can twist the devil's arts to God's ends, thereby cheating
the fiend--Sst! There sounds vespers!_ Plena gratia, ave Virgo--"
_But it did not speak. Long hours, long weeks, the_ doctor mirabilis
_watched his creation, but iron lips were silent and the iron eyes dull,
and no voice but the great man's own sounded in his monkish cell, nor
was there ever an answer to all the questions that he asked--until one
day when he sat surveying his work, composing a letter to Duns Scotus in
distant Cologne--one day--_
_"Time is!" said the image, and smiled benignly._
_The Friar looked up. "Time is, indeed," he echoed. "Time it is that you
give utterance, and to some assertion less obvious than that time is.
For of course time is, else there were nothing at all. Without time--"_
_"Time was!" rumbled the image, still smiling, but sternly at the statue
of Draco._
_"Indeed time was," said the Monk. "Time was, is, and will be, for time
is that medium in which events occur. Matter exists in space, but
events--"_
_The image smiled no longer. "Time is past!" it roared in tones deep as
the cathedral bell outside, and burst into ten thousand pieces_.
* * * * *
"There," said old Haskel van Manderpootz, shutting the book, "is my
classical authority in this experiment. This story, overlaid as it is
with mediæval myth and legend, proves that Roger Bacon himself attempted
the experiment--and failed." He shook a long finger at me. "Yet do not
get the impression, Dixon, that Friar Bacon was not a great man. He
was--extremely great, in fact; he lighted the torch that his namesake
Francis Bacon took up four centuries later, and that now van Manderpootz
rekindles."