mas A. Edison himself
couldn't do that with one of his whiskers."

"You're right," returned Hiram, gravely. "He'd have to borrow one."

"A man that didn't understand electricity and the forces of nature,
and that real brains of a genius are a regular dynamo, might think
that I done that with my breath. But there is a strange power about
me. All it needs is capital to develop it. You've got the capital,
you gents. This ain't any far-away investment. It's right here at
home. I'm all business when it comes to business." He stuck up a grimy
finger. "You've got to concede the mysterious power because you've
seen it for yourselves. Now you come over to my house with me and
I'll show you a few inventions that I've been able to put into shape
in spite of the damnable combination of the trusts."

He slid off the porch and started away, beckoning them after him with
the battered derby.

"I've heard 'em buzz in my time, too," sneered Hiram, pushing back
his plug hat, "but that hummin' is about the busiest yet. He could
hold a lighted taller candle in his hand and jump off'm a roof and
think he was a comet."

But the Cap'n did not seem to be disposed to echo this scorn.

"This here I've got may be only a notion, and it prob'ly is," he said,
knotting his gray brows, "and it don't seem sensible. First sight
of him you wouldn't think he could be used. But when I laid eyes on
old Dot-and-carry-one there, and when he grabbed into this thing the
way he did just as I was thinkin' hard of what Colonel Gid Ward has
done to me, it came over me that I was goin' to find a use for him."

"How?" persisted the utilitarian Hiram.

"Don't have the least idea," confessed the Cap'n. "It's like pickin'
up a stockin' full of wet mud and walkin' along hopin' that you'll
meet the man you want to swat with it. I'm goin' to pick him up."

He stumped off the piazza and followed Mr. Bodge. And Hiram, stopping
to relight his cigar, went along, too, reflecting that when a man
has plenty of time on his hands he can afford to spend a little of
it on the gratification of curiosity.

The first exhibits in the domain of Bodge were not cheering or
suggestive of value. For instance, from among the litter in a
tumble-down shop Mr. Bodge produced something in the shape of a
five-pointed star that he called his "Anti-stagger Shoe."

"I saw old Ike Bradley go past here with a hard-cider jag that looped
over till its aidges dragged on the ground," he explaine