ey arrived at his apartments Asano departed in search
of kinematographic renderings of machinery in motion, and Lincoln
despatched Graham's commands for models of machines and small machines
to illustrate the various mechanical advances of the last two centuries.
The little group of appliances for telegraphic communication attracted
the Master so strongly that his delightfully prepared dinner, served by
a number of charmingly dexterous girls, waited for a space. The habit
of smoking had almost ceased from the face of the earth, but when he
expressed a wish for that indulgence, inquiries were made and some
excellent cigars were discovered in Florida, and sent to him by
pneumatic dispatch while the dinner was still in progress. Afterwards
came the aeronauts, and a feast of ingenious wonders in the hands of a
latter-day engineer. For the time, at any rate, the neat dexterity of
counting and numbering machines, building machines, spinning engines,
patent doorways, explosive motors, grain and water elevators,
slaughter-house machines and harvesting appliances, was more fascinating
to Graham than any bayadere. "We were savages," was his refrain, "we
were savages. We were in the stone age--compared with this.... And what
else have you?"

There came also practical psychologists with some very interesting
developments in the art of hypnotism. The names of Milne Bramwell,
Fechner, Liebault, William James, Myers and Gurney, he found, bore
a value now that would have astonished their contemporaries. Several
practical applications of psychology were now in general use; it had
largely superseded drugs, antiseptics and anaesthetics in medicine; was
employed by almost all who had any need of mental concentration. A
real enlargement of human faculty seemed to have been effected in this
direction. The feats of "calculating boys," the wonders, as Graham had
been wont to regard them, of mesmerisers, were now within the range of
anyone who could afford the services of a skilled hypnotist. Long ago
the old examination methods in education had been destroyed by these
expedients. Instead of years of study, candidates had substituted a few
weeks of trances, and during the trances expert coaches had simply
to repeat all the points necessary for adequate answering, adding a
suggestion of the post hypnotic recollection of these points. In process
mathematics particularly, this aid had been of singular service, and it
was now invariably invoked by