"'Yes,' whispered the woman, and he left her.

"But there are only two people," concluded Jephson, "who do not regard
his saving of the husband's life as a highly noble and unselfish action,
and they are the man himself and the woman."

We thanked Jephson for his story, and promised to profit by the moral,
when discovered. Meanwhile, MacShaugnassy said that he knew a story
dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman
to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was: don't have
anything to do with inventions.

Brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a man
plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral. We agreed to hear the
particulars, and judge for ourselves.

"This story," commenced MacShaugnassy, "comes from Furtwangen, a small
town in the Black Forest. There lived there a very wonderful old fellow
named Nicholaus Geibel. His business was the making of mechanical toys,
at which work he had acquired an almost European reputation. He made
rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a cabbage, flop their ears,
smooth their whiskers, and disappear again; cats that would wash their
faces, and mew so naturally that dogs would mistake them for real cats,
and fly at them; dolls, with phonographs concealed within them, that
would raise their hats and say, 'Good morning; how do you do,' and some
that would even sing a song.

[Illustration: "HE HAD CONTRIVED A MECHANICAL DONKEY."]

"But he was something more than a mere mechanic; he was an artist. His
work was with him a hobby, almost a passion. His shop was filled with
all manner of strange things that never would, or could, be sold--things
he had made for the pure love of making them. He had contrived a
mechanical donkey that would trot for two hours by means of stored
electricity, and trot, too, much faster than the live article, and with
less need for exertion on the part of the driver; a bird that would
shoot up into the air, fly round and round in a circle, and drop to
earth at the exact spot from where it started; a skeleton that,
supported by an upright iron bar, would dance a hornpipe; a life-size
lady doll that could play the fiddle; and a gentleman with a hollow
inside who could smoke a pipe and drink more lager beer than any three
average German students put together, which is saying much.

"Indeed, it was the belief of the town that old Geibel could make a man
capable of doing everything