expect to move our immense car, and to drive it along at a speed, say, of a mile a minute.

"The forward end, having but a quarter of a mile to go, will reach B in fifteen seconds. We will call this platform car number 1. On top of number I are laid rails on which another platform car, number 2, a quarter of a mile shorter than number 1, is moved in precisely the same way. Number 2, in its turn, is surmounted by number 3, moving independently of the tiers. beneath, and a quarter of a mile shorter than number 2. Number 2 is a

mile and a half long; number 3, a mile and a quarter. Above, on successive levels, are number 4, a mile long; number 5, three-quarters of a mile; number 6, half a mile; number 7, a quarter of a mile, and number 8, a short passenger car, on top of all.

"Each car moves upon the car beneath it, independently of all the others, at the rate of a mile a minute. Each car has its own magnetic engines. Well, the train being drawn up with the latter end of each car resting against a lofty bumping-post at A, Tom Furnace, the gentlemanly conductor, and Jean Marie Rivarol, engineer, mount by a long ladder to the exalted number 8. The complicated mechanism is set in motion. What happens?

"Number 8 runs a quarter of a mile in fifteen seconds and reaches the end of number 7. Meanwhile number 7 has run a quarter of a mile in the same time and reached the end of number 6; number 6, a quarter of a mile in fifteen seconds, and reached the end of number 5; number 5, the end of number 4; number 4, of number 3; number 3, of number 2; number 2, of number 1. And number 1, in fifteen seconds, has gone its quarter of a mile along the ground track, and has reached station B. All this has been done in fifteen seconds. Wherefore numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 come to rest against the bumping-post at B at precisely the same second. We, in number 8, reach B just when number I reaches it. In other words, we accomplish two miles in fifteen seconds. Each of the eight cars, moving at the rate of a mile a minute, has contributed a quarter of a mile to our journey, and has done its work in fifteen seconds. All the eight did their work at once, during the same fifteen seconds. Consequently we have been whizzed through the air at the somewhat startling speed of seven and a half seconds to the mile. This is the Tachypomp. Does it justify the name?"

Although a little bewildered by the complexity of cars, I apprehended the general principle of the machine. I made a diagram and understood it much better. "You have merely improved on the idea of my moving faster than the train when I was going to the smoking car?"

"Precisely. So far we have kept within the bounds of the practicable. To satisfy the professor you can theorize in something after this fashion: If we double the number of cars, thus decreasing by one half the distance which each has to go, we shall attain twice the speed. Each of the sixteen cars will have but one eighth of a mile to go. At the uniform rate we have adopted, the two miles can be done in seven and a half instead of fifteen seconds. With thirty-two cars, and a sixteenth of a mile, or twenty rods difference in their length, we arrive at the speed of a mile in less than two seconds; with sixty-four cars, each traveling but ten rods, a mile under the

second. More than sixty miles a minute! If this isn't rapid enough for the professor, tell him to go on, increasing the number of his cars and diminishing the distance cach one has to run. If sixty-four cars yield a speed of a mile inside the second, let him fancy a Tachypomp of six hundred and forty cars, and amuse himself calculating the rate of car number 640. Just whisper to him that when he has an infinite number of cars with an infinitesimal difference in their lengths, he will have obtained that infinite speed for which he seems to yearn. Then demand Abscissa.”

I wrung my friend's hand in silent and grateful admiration. I could say nothing.

"You have listened to the man of theory," he said proudly. "You shall now behold the practical engineer. We will go to the west of the Mississippi and find some suitably level locality. We will erect thereon a Model Tachypomp. We will summon thereunto the professor, his daughter, and why not his fair sister Jocasta, as well? We will take them a journey which shall much astonish the venerable Surd. He shall place Abscissa's digits in yours and bless you both with an algebraic formula. Jocasta shall contemplate with wonder the genius of Rivarol. But we have much to do. We must ship to St. Joseph the vast amount of material to be employed in the construction of the Tachypomp. We must engage a small army of workmen to effect that construction, for we are to annihilate time and space. Perhaps you had better see your bankers."

I rushed impetuously to the door. There should be no delay. "Stop! stop! Um Gottes Willen, stop!" shrieked Rivarol. "I launched my butcher this morning and I haven't bolted the "

But it was too late. I was upon the trap. It swung open with a crash and I was plunged down, down, down! I felt as if I were falling through illimitable space. I remember wondering, as I rushed through the darkness, whether I should reach Kerguelen's Land, or stop at the center. It seemed an eternity. Then my course was suddenly and painfully arrested.

I opened my eyes. Around me were the walls of Professor Surd's study. Under me was a hard, unyielding plane which I knew too well was Professor Surd's study floor. Behind me was the black, slippery haircloth chair which had belched me forth, much as the whale served Jonah. In front of me stood Professor Surd himself, looking down with a not unpleasant smile.

"Good evening, Mr. Furnace. Let me help you up. You look tired, sir. No wonder you fell asleep when I kept you so long waiting. Shall I get you a glass of wine? No? By the way, since receiving your letter I find that you are a son of my old friend, Judge Furnace. I have made inquiries, and see no reason why you should not make Abscissa a good husband."

Still I can see no reason why the Tachypomp should not have succeeded. Can you?

IN

66

TOO LATE

BY ROSE TERRY COOKE (1827-1892)

""Tis true 'tis pity! pity 'tis, 'tis true!"

N one of those scanty New England towns that fill a stranger with the acutest sense of desolation, more desolate than the desert itself, because there are human inhabitants to suffer from its solitude and listlessness, there stood, and still stands, a large red farmhouse, with sloping roof, and great chimney in the middle, where David Blair lived. Perhaps Wingfield was not so forlorn to him as to another, for he had Scotch blood in his veins, and his shrewd thrift found full exercise in redeeming the earth from thorns and briars, and eating his bread under the full force of the primeval curse. He was a dour" man, with a long, grim visage that would have become any Covenanter's conventicle in his native land; and his prayers were as long and grim as his face. Of life's graces and amenities he had no idea; they would have been scouted as profane vanities had they blossomed inside his threshold. Existence to him was a heavy and dreadful responsibility; a drear and doubtful working out of his own salvation; a perpetual fleeing from the wrath to come, that seemed to dog his heels and rear threatening heads at every turn. A cowardly man, with these ever-present terrors, would have taken refuge in some sweet and lulling sin or creed, some belief of a universal salvation, some epicurean "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or some idea in nothing beyond the grave.

But David Blair was full of courage. Like some knotty, twisted oak, that offers scant solace to the eye, he endured, oaklike, all storms, and bent not an atom to any fierce blast of nature or Providence; for he made a distinction between them. His wife was a neat, quiet, subdued woman, who held her house and her husband in as much reverence as a Feejee holds his idols. Like most women, she had an instinctive love for grace and beauty, but from long repression it was only a blind and groping instinct. Her house was kept in a state of spotless purity, but was bald as any vineless rock within. Flies never intruded there; spiders still less. The windows of the "best room" were veiled and double veiled with green paper shades and snow white cotton curtains, and the ghastly light that strayed in through these obstructions revealed a speckless but hideous homespun carpet, four straight-backed chairs, with horsehair seats, an equally black and shining sofa, and a round mahogany table with a great Bible in the midst. No

From The Galaxy, January, 1875; copyright, 1875, by Sheldon & Co. Republished in the volume, The Sphinx's Children, and Other People's (1886), by Rose Terry Cooke; copyright, 1886, by Ticknor and Company. Republished by special arrangement with and the permission of the Houghton Mifflin Company.

vases, no shells, no ornament of useless fashion stood on the white wooden mantelpiece over the open fireplace; no stencil border broke the monotonous whitewash of the walls. You could see your face in a state of distortion and jaundice anywhere in the andirons, so brilliant were their brassy columns; and the very bricks of the chimney were scraped and washed from the soot of the rare fire. You could hardly imagine that even the leaping, laughing wood fire could impart any cheer to the funereal order of that chill and musty apartment. Bedroom, kitchen, shed, woodhouse all shared this scrupulous array. The processes that in other households are wont to give cheery tokens of life, and bounty, and natural appetites and passions, seemed here to be carried on under protest. No flour was spilled when Thankful Blair made bread; no milk ever slopped from an overfull pail; no shoe ever brought in mud or sand across the mats that lay inside and outside of every door. The very garret preserved an aspect of serenity, since all its bundles of herbs hung evenly side by side, and the stores of nuts had each their separate boundaries, lest some jarring door or intrusive mouse should scatter them.

In the midst of all this order there was yet a child, if little Hannah Blair ever was a child in more than name. From her babyhood she was the model of all Wingfield babies; a child that never fretted, that slept nights through all the pangs and perils of teething, that had every childish disease with perfect decency and patience, was a child to be held up to every mother's admiration. Poor little soul! The mother love that crushed those other babies with kisses, that romped and laughed with them, when she was left straight and solemn in her cradle, that petted, and slapped, and spoiled, and scolded all those common children, Thankful Blair kept under lock and key in her inmost heart.

"Beware of idols!" was the stern warning that had fallen on her first outburst of joy at the birth of one living child at last, and from that time the whole tenor of her husband's speech and prayer had been that they both might be saved from the awful sin of idolatry, and be enabled to bring up their child in the fear of the Lord, a hater of sin and follower of the law: the gospel that a baby brought to light was not yet theirs! So Hannah grew to girlhood, a feminine reproduction of her father. Keen, practical insight is not the most softening trait for a woman to possess. It is iron and steel in the soul that does not burn with love mighty and outflowing enough to fuse all other elements in its own glow, and as Hannah grew older and read her mother's repressed nature through and through, the tender heart, the timid conscience, the longing after better and brighter things than life offered to her only moved her child to an unavowed contempt for a soul so weak and so childish. In a certain way Hannah Blair loved her mother, but it was more as if she had been her child than her parent. Toward her father her feelings were far different. She respected him; he was her model. She alone knew, from a like experience, what reserved depth of feeling lay unawakened under his rigid exterior - she knew, for there were times when her own granite nature shuddered through and through with volcanic forces, when her only refuge against generous indignation or mighty anger was in solitary prayer and grievous wrestlings of the flesh against the spirit as well

as the spirit against the flesh. So Hannah grew up to womanhood. Tall and slight as any woodland sapling, but without the native grace of a free growth, her erect and alert figure pleased only by its alacrity and spotless clothing. She was "dredful spry," as old Moll Thunder, the half-breed Indian woman, used to say - 'dredful spry; most like squaw so still, so straight; blue eyes, most like ice. Ho! Moll better walk a chalk 'fore Miss Hanner!"

And Moll spoke from bitter experience, for old Deacon Campbell himself never gave her severer lectures on her ungodly life and conversation than dropped with cutting distinctness from those prim, thin, red lips. Yet Hannah Blair was not without charms for the youth of Wingfield. Spare as she was, her face had the fresh bloom of youth upon its high, straight features; her eyes were blue and bright, her hair, smoothed about her small head, glittered like fresh flax, and made a heavy coil, that her slender white throat seemed over small to sustain. She was cool, serene, rather unapproachable to lovers or love makers, but she was David Blair's only child, and his farm lay fair and wide on the high plains of Wingfield. She was well-to-do and pious - charms which hold to this day potent sway over the youth of her native soil—and after she was eighteen no Saturday night passed in solitude in the Blair keeping-room, for young men of all sorts and sizes ranged themselves against the wall, sometimes four at once, tilted their chairs, twirled their thumbs, crossed one foot and then the other over their alternate knees, dropped sparse remarks about the corn, or the weather, or the sermon, sometimes even the village politics, but one and all stared at Hannah as she sat upright and prim by the fireplace or the window, arrayed in a blue stuff gown or a flowered chintz, as the season might be, and sitting as serene, as cool, as uninteresting as any cherub on a tombstone, till the old Dutch clock struck nine, the meeting-house bell tolled, and the young men, one and all, made their awkward farewells and went home, uttering, no doubt, a sigh of relief when the painful pleasure was

over.

By and by the Wingfield store, long kept by Uncle Gid Mayhew, began to have a look of new life, for the old man's only son, Charley Mayhew, had come home from Boston, where he had been ten years in a drygoods shop, to take the business off his father's hands. Just in time, too, for the store was scarce set to rights in symmetrical fashion when Uncle Gid was struck with paralysis and put to bed for all the rest of his life - a brief one at that. Wingfield gossips shook their heads and muttered that the new order of things was enough to kill him. After so many years of dust and confusion, to see the pepper corns, candy, and beeswax sorted out into fresh, clean jars; the shoes and ribbons, cut nails and bar soap neatly disentangled and arranged; the plows, harrows, cheeses, hoes, and bales of cotton and calico divorced and placed at different ends of the store; the grimy windows washed, and the dirty floor cleaned and swept, was perhaps a shock to the old man, but not enough to kill him. His eighty years of vegetation sufficed for that; but he left behind him this son, so full of life, and spirit, and fun, so earnest at work, so abounding in energy, but withal so given over to frolic in its time, that it seemed as if even Wingfield stagnation never could