r Chill slices the earth like a
hot knife plowing a field of Jersey butter, and the modern gang plow,
bearing upon its wheels the gloved and umbrella'd leader of the Populist
Party, plows up the whole face of the earth in a single day.

What a wonderful workshop is the brain of man! Its noiseless machinery
cuts, and carves, and moulds, in the imponderable material of ideas.
It works its endless miracles through the brawny arm of labor, and the
deft fingers of skill, and the world moves forward by its magic. Aladdin
rubbed his lamp and the shadowy genii of fable performed impossible
wonders. The dreamer of to-day rubs his fingers through his hair and the
genii of his intellect work miracles which eclipse the most extravagant
fantasies of the "Arabian Nights."

A dreamer saw the imprisoned vapor throw open the lid of a teakettle,
and lo! a steam engine came puffing from his brain. And now many a huge
monster of Corliss, beautiful as a vision of Archimedes and smooth in
movement as a wheeling planet, sends its thrill of life and power
through mammoth plants of humming machinery. The fiery courser of the
steel-bound track shoots over hill and plain, like a mid-night meteor
through the fields of heaven, outstripping the wind.

A dreamer carried about in his brain a great Leviathan. It was launched
upon the billows, and like some collossal swan the palatial steamship
now sweeps in majesty through the blue wastes of old ocean.

Six hundred years before Christ, some old Greek discovered electricity
by rubbing a piece of amber, and unable to grasp the mystery, he called
it soul. His discovery slept for more than two thousand years until it
awoke in the dreams of Galvani, and Volta, and Benjamin Franklin. In the
morning of the nineteenth century the sculptor and scientist, Morse, saw
in his dreams, phantom lightnings leap across continents, and oceans,
and felt the pulse of thunder beat as it came bounding over threads of
iron that girdled the earth. In each throb he read a human thought. The
electric telegraph emerged from his brain, like Minerva from the brow of
Jove, and the world received a fresh baptism of light and glory.

In a few more years we will step over the threshold of the twentieth
century. What greater wonders will the dreamers yet unfold? It may be
that another magician, greater even than Edison, the "Wizzard of Menloe
Park," will rise up and coax the very laws of nature into easy compliance
with his unheard-