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Domestic Disaster.

Of all inventors the home inventor is the most disastrous. He is the terror of his wife and his insurance company. The labour-saving devices he invents usually rear up and smite him and his. Whenever his wife detects him contemplating any part of the house with the brooding look inventors always wear, she packs up and goes home to mother for the duration of the attack.

I knew some people who bought a house from an inventor and who were forced to apply for a “stay of aspirations,” or a “nolle nilly nolle,” or something equally expensive, in order to escape the consequences.

When they pulled out the bath plug, a metal towel arm flew out of the wall and hit them below the belt. When they poked the fire, a jet of coal squirted down the chimney accompanied by a load of soot. The milkman became tangled in a burglar alarm, and sued for damages on account of the iron ball which fell on him out of a trapdoor in the verandah ceiling. The first time the telephone rang, the patent call-recorder sent the electric stove up in a sheet of flame. The automatic shoe-scraper ran amuck and bit off the new owner's big toe. The wife fell through a trap-door into the garage below. The gaseconomiser back-fired and sent the meter through the roof. Finally, when the patent fire extinguisher set the house alight, they decided that the flame of genius was too incendiary.