t do you want to do? Put my engine in your museum?" This
with a short laugh.

Austin shook his head. "I see you are about as ignorant as the rest of
the world as to the real nature of our work. Confess now!"

Ernest smiled. "I suppose I've been reading papers and reports from the
Smithsonian for ten years, but until I met you, Mr. Austin, I was
certainly vague about who or what the work represented. Go ahead and
give Moore the explanation you gave me, will you?"

"Well," began Austin, "an Englishman named Smithson left his estate to
his nephew named Hungerford with the stipulation that if Hungerford died
without heirs, the state was to go to found the Smithsonian Institution
in America. Hungerford obligingly died without issue. It was in 1835, I
think, and after a great deal of red tape, about half a million dollars
was turned over to the American Congress to go to work with.

"Of course, Congress did considerable false stepping but finally the
Institution was organized with the avowed purpose of increasing and
diffusing knowledge. Rather a large program, eh! It was proposed to
carry this program out by stimulating talented men to make original
researches by offering prizes, by appropriating every year a sum of
money for particular researches and by every year publishing reports on
the progress of difficult branches of knowledge.

"The original bequest has been increased until now the Institution has
use of the income on a million dollars. You'll be surprised to know how
much real work has been done by this very little advertised branch of
our government. For example, out of the system of weather observation
developed by the Institution grew the United States Weather Bureau. The
United States Ethnological Research is all done by us--as witness the
monumental studies of our American Indians. Powell's great explorations
were fathered by the Smithsonian and so were Langley's experiments in
flying machines as well as his studies of solar heat."

"My word!" exclaimed Roger, "so they were!"

"When I was in the northern part of the state, last summer, studying
certain Indian mounds, I ran across one of your fellow instructors who
mentioned your work in heat engineering. I've always been much
interested in that line of research, so when I came West again I tried
to get in touch with you."

"I'm not hard to reach, surely," said Roger.

"Oh, yes, you are," returned Austin.

"It was this way, Rog," Ernest's lazy, gentle