accurately adapted to his or her condition and needs as would be any
inquiries a preoccupied clergyman would be likely to make under similar
circumstances. I could readily see the necessity of some such substitute
for the pastor, when I was informed that every prominent clergyman
was now in the habit of supplying at least a dozen or two pulpits
simultaneously, appearing by turns in one of them personally, and by
phonograph in the others.

The inventor of the contrivance for welcoming strangers was, it
appeared, applying the same idea to machines for discharging many other
of the more perfunctory obligations of social intercourse. One being
made for the convenience of the President of the United States at public
receptions was provided with forty-two buttons for the different States,
and others for the principal cities of the Union, so that a caller,
by proper manipulation, might, while shaking a handle, be addressed
in regard to his home interests with an exactness of information
as remarkable as that of the traveling statesmen who rise from the
gazetteer to astonish the inhabitants of Wayback Crossing with the
precise figures of their town valuation and birth rate, while the engine
is taking in water.

We had by this time spent so much time that on finally starting for the
railroad station we had to walk quite briskly. As we were hurrying
along the street, my attention was arrested by a musical sound, distinct
though not loud, proceeding apparently from the indispensable which
Hamage, like everybody else I had seen, wore at his side. Stopping
abruptly, he stepped aside from the throng, and, lifting the
indispensable quickly to his ear, touched something, and exclaiming,
"Oh, yes, to be sure!" dropped the instrument to his side.

Then he said to me: "I am reminded that I promised my wife to bring home
some story-books for the children when I was in town to-day. The store
is only a few steps down the street." As we went along, he explained
to me that nobody any longer pretended to charge his mind with the
recollection of duties or engagements of any sort. Everybody depended
upon his indispensable to remind him in time of all undertakings and
responsibilities. This service it was able to render by virtue of a
simple enough adjustment of a phonographic cylinder charged with the
necessary word or phrase to the clockwork in the indispensable, so that
at any time fixed upon in setting the arrangement an alarm would sound,