for instance, with greater certainty than one feels in
taking quinine, your profession would have to put up the shutters and go
into some such business as writing articles on 'Measles as It Used to
Be,' or 'Disorders of the Ante-Electrical Period.' The fine part of it
all is that we should not have to rely for our medicines upon the state
of the arsenic market, or the quinine supply, or the squill product of
the year. Electric sparks can be made without number whether the sun
shines or not. The failure of the Peruvian Bark Crop, or the destruction
by an early frost of the Castor Oil Wells, would cease to be a hideous
possibility to delicate natures. They could all fail for all mankind
need fear, for electricity can be generated when and wherever one has
need of it. If your electric pills were used up, and the chemist too far
away from your house for you to get the supply replenished at the
moment, you could put on your slippers and by walking up and down your
carpeted floor for ten or fifteen minutes generate enough electricity to
see you through. Of course you'd have to have a pair of
dynamic-storage-reservoir slippers to catch the sparks as they flew, but
I fancy they'd be less costly in the long run than the medicines we have
to-day."

"Why have wet feet at all if electricity is to be so all-powerful?"
suggested Mr. Whitechoker. "Why not devise an electrical foot-protector
and ward off all possibility of damp, cold feet?"

"You couldn't do that with men and women constituted as they are," said
the Idiot. "Your foot-protector would no doubt be a good thing, but so
are rubber overshoes. Nothing will ever be patented to compel a man to
keep his feet dry, and he won't do it except under compulsion, but once
having his feet wet he will seek the remedy. It's the Elixir of Life
that I bank on most, however. I don't believe there is one among us,
excepting Mrs. Pedagog, to whom twenty-five was not the most delightful
period of existence. To Mrs. Pedagog, as to all women, eighteen is
the limit. But men at twenty-five and women at eighteen know so much,
enjoy so much, regard themselves so highly! There is nothing _blase_
about them then. Disillusion--which I think ought to be called
dissolution--comes later. At thirty a man discovers that the things he
knew at twenty-five aren't so; and as for a woman at twenty-five, if so
be she is unmarried, her life is empty, and if so be she is married, she
has cares in the shape of chil