antly in
Whitcomb Mansions; and, this time, the stage prowlers, should not steal
his idea. To begin with, apart from a few pieces of technical advice which
he received from a friend of his, an engineer, nobody knew about it; and
Jimmy felt sure that, even when the apparatus was at work, he would not
fall a victim to the confraternity who, ever on the watch for new tricks,
study them, judge of the weak points, copy whatever suits them, including
scenery and music, and, sometimes, succeed in earning more money than the
inventor himself; he would have nothing to fear from the Trampies, the
pirates, the plagiarists, those plagues of the profession. Certainly,
there were great bill-toppers, creators of sensations who discovered new
things--terrifying feats of gyroscopic balancing, or flights through
space, based upon principles of ballistics, assisted by the spiral
spring--daring risk-alls, nerve-shakers, purveyors of thrills, turning to
intelligent account the seductive power which dangerous feats exercise
upon the public. Jimmy knew all about that. He was not the only one; but,
this time, it was a question of a scientific application which would,
beyond a doubt, place him at the head of that pick of the music-hall. It
would be pure science and patient calculation: an algebraical hippogriff,
with pluck in the saddle.

Jimmy's plans resulted from intuition rather than real knowledge; but
learning has nothing to do with the creative spirit. Now Jimmy, although
he was unaware of it, possessed the genius that invents; and his
comparative ignorance did him no great harm: his imagination, unhampered
by theories, was all the freer for it. Jimmy had the higher instinct of
the born machinist, who is content to use a bit of string where a
school-bred engineer will cram every manner of gear, chains, pulleys and
windlasses. It is true that he was assisted in his research by many
experiments already tried elsewhere; but he dreamed of something different
and, in the calm of Whitcomb Mansions, had studied without respite.

"Pooh!" he reflected. "All those sails, all that weight! Boxes heaped one
on the top of the other--cubes to catch the air--a man sitting inert in a
basket, with his hand on a lever and a crank: it's as though one tried to
make a stuffed bird fly! And what becomes of the man in all that: the back
push, the daring stroke? The man has got to be the backbone of the
machine, with his quick balancings, his bendings, which are