to take the
medicine."

"You wouldn't make much money out of it, though," said the Poet. "If one
bottle sufficed for a library you wouldn't find much of a demand."

"That could be got around in two ways," said the Idiot. "We could
copyright every bottle of Dreamaline and require the consumers to pay us
a royalty on every book inspired by it, or we could ourselves take what
I would call Financial Dreamaline, one dose of which would make a man
feel like a millionaire. Life is only feeling after all. If you feel
like a millionaire you are as happy as a millionaire--happier, in fact,
because in reality you do not have to wear your thumbs out cutting
coupons on the first of every month. Then I should have Art Dreamaline.
You could have it arranged so that by a certain dose you could have old
masters all over your house; by another dose you could get a collection
of modern French paintings, and by swallowing a whole bottle you could
dream that your walls were lined with mysteries that would drive the
Impressionists crazy with envy. In Scientific Dreamaline you would get
ideas for invention that would revolutionize the world."

"How about the poets and the humorists?" asked the Poet.

"They'd be easy," said the Idiot. "I wouldn't have any hasheesh in the
mixture for them. Welsh rarebit would do, and you'd get poems so
mysterious and jokes so uproarious that the whole world would soon be
filled with wonder and with laughter. In short, Dreamaline would go into
every walk of life. Music, letters, art, poetry, finance. Every man
according to his bent or his tastes could partake. Every man could make
with it his own little world in which he was himself the prime mover,
and so harmless would it be that when next morning he awoke he would be
as tranquil and as happy as a babe. I hope, gentlemen, to see the day
when Dreamaline is an established fact, when we cannot enter a household
in the land that does not have hanging on its walls, after the manner of
those glass fire hand-grenades, a wire rack holding a row of bottles
labelled Art, Letters, Music, and so on, instead of libraries,
picture-galleries, music-rooms, and laboratories. The rich and the poor
alike may have it. The child who loves to have stories told to him will
cry for it; the poor wanderer who loves opera and cannot afford even to
pass the opera-house in a cable-car, can go into a drug-store, and for a
cent, begged of a kind-hearted pedestrian on the street, purchas