d could have
fancied any folly.

He rose, shook himself, and then took a long pull at a black bottle that
always stood on a shelf. When a man puts a black bottle to his lips,
tips it up, and takes down several good pulls almost without drawing
breath, most people suppose that he is a person of vicious habits. In
Overholt's case most people would have been wrong. The black bottle
contained cold tea; it was strong, but it was only tea, and that is the
finest drink in the world for an inventor or an author to work on. When
I say an author I mean a poor writer of prose, for I have always been
told that all poets are either mad, or bad, or both. Many of them must
be bad, or they could not write such atrocious poems; but madness is
different; perhaps they read their own verses.

When Overholt had swallowed his cold tea, he got out his drawing
materials, stretched a fresh sheet of thick draughtsman's paper on the
board, and sat down between the motor that would not move and the
little city in which Hope had taken lodgings for a while, and he went to
work with ruler, scale and dividers, and the hard wood template for
drawing the curves he had constructed for the tangent-balance by a very
abstruse mathematical calculation. That was right, at all events, only,
as it was to be reversed, he laid it on the paper with the under-side
up.

He worked nearly all night to finish the drawing, slept two hours in a
battered Shaker rocking-chair by the fire, woke in broad daylight, drank
more cold tea, and went at once to his lathe, for the new piece was in
the nature of a cylinder, and a good deal of the work could be done by
turning.

The chisel and the lathe seemed to be talking to each other over the
block of wood, and what they said rang like a tune in John Henry's head.

"Bricks without straw, bricks without straw, bricks without straw,"
repeated the lathe regularly, at each revolution, and when it said
"bricks" the treadle was up, and when it said "straw" the treadle was
down, for of course it was only a foot lathe, though a good one.
"Sh--sh--sh--ever so much better than no bricks at all--sh--sh--sh,"
answered the sharp chisel as it pressed and bit the wood, and made a
little irregular clattering when it was drawn away, and then came
forward against the block again with a long hushing sound; and Overholt
was inclined to accept its opinion, and worked on as if an obliging
brassfounder were waiting outside to take the model away a