mixture for them. Welsh rarebit would do, and you'd get poems so
mysterious and jokes so uproarious that the whole world would soon be
filled with wonder and with laughter. In short, Dreamaline would go into
every walk of life. Music, letters, art, poetry, finance. Every man
according to his bent or his tastes could partake. Every man could make
with it his own little world in which he was himself the prime mover,
and so harmless would it be that when next morning he awoke he would be
as tranquil and as happy as a babe. I hope, gentlemen, to see the day
when Dreamaline is an established fact, when we cannot enter a household
in the land that does not have hanging on its walls, after the manner of
those glass fire hand-grenades, a wire rack holding a row of bottles
labelled Art, Letters, Music, and so on, instead of libraries,
picture-galleries, music-rooms, and laboratories. The rich and the poor
alike may have it. The child who loves to have stories told to him will
cry for it; the poor wanderer who loves opera and cannot afford even to
pass the opera-house in a cable-car, can go into a drug-store, and for a
cent, begged of a kind-hearted pedestrian on the street, purchase a
sufficient quantity to imagine himself a box-holder; the ambitious
statesman can through its influences enjoy the sensation of thinking
himself President of the United States. Not a man, woman, or child lives
but would find it a boon, and as harmless as a Graham cracker. That,
gentlemen, is my crowning invention, and until I see it realized I
invent no more. Good-morning."
And in a moment he was gone.
"Well!" said Mr. Pedagog. "That's the cap to the climax."
"Yes," said Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog.
"Where do you suppose he got the idea?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"I don't know," said the Doctor. "But I suspect that without knowing it
he's had some of the stuff he describes. Most of his schemes indicate
it, and Dreamaline, I think, proves it."
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Inventions of the Idiot, by John Kendrick Bangs