Project Gutenberg's The Enchanted Typewriter, by John Kendrick Bangs

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Title: The Enchanted Typewriter

Author: John Kendrick Bangs

Posting Date: February 15, 2009 [EBook #3162]
Release Date: April, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE ENCHANTED TYPEWRITER

By John Kendrick Bangs

I. THE DISCOVERY

It is a strange fact, for which I do not expect ever satisfactorily to
account, and which will receive little credence even among those who
know that I am not given to romancing--it is a strange fact, I say, that
the substance of the following pages has evolved itself during a period
of six months, more or less, between the hours of midnight and four
o'clock in the morning, proceeding directly from a type-writing machine
standing in the corner of my library, manipulated by unseen hands. The
machine is not of recent make. It is, in fact, a relic of the early
seventies, which I discovered one morning when, suffering from a slight
attack of the grip, I had remained at home and devoted my time to
pottering about in the attic, unearthing old books, bringing to the
light long-forgotten correspondences, my boyhood collections of "stuff,"
and other memory-inducing things. Whence the machine came originally I
do not recall. My impression is that it belonged to a stenographer once
in the employ of my father, who used frequently to come to our house to
take down dictations. However this may be, the machine had lain hidden
by dust and the flotsam and jetsam of the house for twenty years, when,
as I have said, I came upon it unexpectedly. Old man as I am--I shall
soon be thirty--the fascination of a machine has lost none of its
potency. I am as pleased to-day watching the wheels of my watch "go
round" as ever I was, and to "monkey" with a type-writing apparatus has
always brought great joy into my heart--though for composing give me
the pen. Perhaps I should apologize for the use here of the verb monkey,
which savors of what a friend of mine calls the "English slanguage," to
differentiate it from what he also calls the "Andrew