The Age of Din-Vention.

Dear reader, you will agree with me that thingamy's invention of to-day is nothing more than your idea of yesterday, tailored in puffs and pants and aided and abetted by brass-studded racketty-coos, super-serrated hurdey-gurdeys, and demi-semi-quivers. Do not protest that at some time or another in your darkest moments you have not thrown a mental conception of the gabblephone, the saxamoan, the I-scream cone, fireless illumination, henless incubation, footless perambulation, wireless commotion, the vacuum screamer, the slayer piano, the ukedilly, the scareoplane, and the tripewriter—in fact the whole box of wheezing ironmongery that sits on our chests by day and haunts us by night.

It is greatly to your credit, however, that you refrained from giving material manifestation to your mechanical morbidities. Not so the inventors; they are of baser clay—almost mud, in fact. They have no bowels of compassion—only valves of compression. They pursue us with maddened mechanisms, while they themselves are merely hanging by their finger-nails to the tails of their own inventions. They have tuned us up until we are ever two jumps ahead of ourselves, and have as much chance of catching up as the can on the dog's tail.

The inventor has annihilated space and time, and peace of mind, and has dealt Humanity a stunning blow on the dulce domum, or bump of serenity.

“Hurry!” yelps the modern mile-murderer. “Step on it,” squeals his wife. “Give her the gravy,” shriek his young Robots in chorus, and they all rush hither at desperate speed, and when they get there they all rush back again. Whither, dear reader, and why the slither. It is vain to ask the inventor. He is—like house-maid's neck, Mussolini, and Monday—a necessary weevil in the dog biscuit of existence, but also he is a mere insentient section of perverted protoplasm who suffers from a dumbell in the carillon, an air pocket in the mental acoustics, a marcelle in the cerebral pastry, squeaks and rattles under the bonnet, woolly aphis in the chamber of horrors, and water-bubbles in the bowser.