The Inventions of the Idiot by John Kendrick Bangs (good inspirational books txt) 📗
- Author: John Kendrick Bangs
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"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, purchase a sufficient quantity to imagine himself a box-holder; the ambitious statesman can through its influences enjoy the sensation of thinking himself President of the United States. Not a man, woman, or child lives but would find it a boon, and as harmless as a Graham cracker. That, gentlemen, is my crowning invention, and until I see it realized I invent no more. Good-morning."
And in a moment he was gone.
"Well!" said Mr. Pedagog. "That's the cap to the climax."
"Yes," said Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog.
"Where do you suppose he got the idea?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"I don't know," said the Doctor. "But I suspect that without knowing it he's had some of the stuff he describes. Most of his schemes indicate it, and Dreamaline, I think, proves it."
THE END End of Project Gutenberg's The Inventions of the Idiot, by John Kendrick Bangs
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