"gives one a sort of vague sense of
mental power. It leads to no result in my case. Still, it is an agreeable
sensation to have it floating across my mind that some day I shall solve
the Great Problem. Ah! if I was only an inventor!"

"And so you are."

"No, no," said Hazel, disclaiming as earnestly as some people claim; "I
do things that look like acts of invention, but they are acts of memory.
I could show you plates and engravings of all the things I have seemed to
invent. A man who studies books instead of skimming them can cut a dash
in a desert island, until the fatal word goes forth--invent; and then you
find him out."

"I am sure I wish I had never said the fatal word. You will never get
well if you puzzle your brain over impossibilities."

"Impossibilities! But is not that begging the question? The measure of
impossibilities is lost in the present age. I propose a test. Let us go
back a century, and suppose that three problems were laid before the men
of that day, and they were asked to decide which is the most impossible:
1st, to diffuse intelligence from a fixed island over a hundred leagues
of water; 2d, to make the sun take in thirty seconds likenesses more
exact than any portrait-painter ever took--likenesses that can be sold
for a shilling at fifty per cent profit; 3d, for New York and London to
exchange words by wire so much faster than the earth can turn, that
London shall tell New York at ten on Monday morning what was the price of
consols at two o'clock Monday afternoon."

"That is a story," said Helen, with a look of angelic reproach.

"I accept that reply," said Hazel. "As for me, I have got a smattering of
so many subjects, all full of incredible truths, that my faith in the
impossibility of anything is gone. Ah! if James Watt was only here
instead of John Hazel--James Watt from the Abbey with a head as big as a
pumpkin--he would not have gone groping about the island, writing on
rocks, and erecting signals. No; he would have had some grand and bold
idea worthy of the proposition."

"Well, so I think," said Helen, archly; "that great man with the great
head would have begun by making a kite a hundred yards high."

"Would he? Well, he was quite capable of it."

"Yes; and rubbed it with phosphorus, and flown it the first tempest, and
made the string fast to--the island itself."

"Well, that is an idea," said Hazel, staring; "rather hyperbolical, I
fear. But, after all, it is an idea."

"