she said.

"'Yes,' he answered.

"She raised her eyes to his, then struck him across the face with her
ungloved hand.

"'You damned fool!' she whispered.

"He seized her by her white arms, and forced her back behind the orange
trees. 'Do you know why?' he said, speaking slowly and distinctly;
'because I feared that, with him dead, you would want me to marry you,
and that, talked about as we have been, I might find it awkward to avoid
doing so; because I feared that, without him to stand between us, you
might prove an annoyance to me--perhaps come between me and the woman I
love, the woman I am going back to. Now do you understand?'

"'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, MacShaughnassy 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 MacShaughnassy, "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, flap 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.

"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 tha