g to the last strap, and Pine Gully, Arkansas,
hanging onto the rear step, this town of Solitas will wake up and ask
if anybody spoke.

"The captain went ashore with us, and offered to conduct what he
seemed to like to call the obsequies. He introduced Henry and me to
the United States Consul, and a roan man, the head of the Department
of Mercenary and Licentious Dispositions, the way it read upon his
sign.

"'I touch here again a week from to-day,' says the captain.

"'By that time,' we told him, 'we'll be amassing wealth in the
interior towns with our galvanized prima donna and correct imitations
of Sousa's band excavating a march from a tin mine.'

"'Ye'll not,' says the captain. 'Ye'll be hypnotized. Any gentleman
in the audience who kindly steps upon the stage and looks this
country in the eye will be converted to the hypothesis that he's but
a fly in the Elgin creamery. Ye'll be standing knee deep in the surf
waiting for me, and your machine for making Hamburger steak out of
the hitherto respected art of music will be playing "There's no place
like home."'

"Henry skinned a twenty off his roll, and received from the Bureau
of Mercenary Dispositions a paper bearing a red seal and a dialect
story, and no change.

"Then we got the consul full of red wine, and struck him for a
horoscope. He was a thin, youngish kind of man, I should say past
fifty, sort of French-Irish in his affections, and puffed up with
disconsolation. Yes, he was a flattened kind of a man, in whom drink
lay stagnant, inclined to corpulence and misery. Yes, I think he was
a kind of Dutchman, being very sad and genial in his ways.

"'The marvelous invention,' he says, 'entitled the phonograph, has
never invaded these shores. The people have never heard it. They
would not believe it if they should. Simple-hearted children of
nature, progress has never condemned them to accept the work of a
can-opener as an overture, and rag-time might incite them to a bloody
revolution. But you can try the experiment. The best chance you have
is that the populace may not wake up when you play. There's two
ways,' says the consul, 'they may take it. They may become inebriated
with attention, like an Atlanta colonel listening to "Marching
Through Georgia," or they will get excited and transpose the key of
the music with an axe and yourselves into a dungeon. In the latter
case,' says the consul, 'I'll do my duty by cabling to the State
Department, and I'll wrap