——­What a coltish fire of enthusiasm pranced in the worthy little Frenchman’s veins, to be sure!

“Eh, bien! Now, distance made no matter; it was forever subdued.  I could as soon send messages to the Sun itself as to my next-door neighbor!  Smile on, Monsieur!  Cesar Prevost shall not be piqued at your incredulity.  He also was amazed, prostrated, when all the stupendous consequences of his discovery first flashed upon his mind; and it was very long before he could rid his mind of the notion that he was become victim to the phantasms of a ridiculous dream. Eh, bien! ’t was very simple, once analyzed.  Know one fact, and you have all.  And this one fact, so simple, yet so grand, was just this:—­That a male and female snail, having been once, by contact, put in communication with one another, so as to become what magnetizers call en rapport the one with the other, continue ever after to sympathize, no matter what space may divide them. ’T is in a nutshell, you perceive,—­and giving me the entire principle of an unlimited telegraphic communication.  All that was to do was to systematize it.  Tedious work, you may conceive, Monsieur; yet I did not shrink from it, nor find it irksome, for my assured result was ever leading me onward.  Ah, bah! what did I not dream then?—­Passons!

“I was not rich, and so, to save the trouble and expense of importing my snails to Paris,—­vast trouble and expense, of course, since my experiments were so numerous,—­I came across the Atlantic, and fixed myself at a point near St. Louis, where I could study in peace and have the subjects of my experiments close at hand.  I used to pay the trappers liberally to get my snails for me, instructing them how to gather and how to transport them; and to divert all suspicion from my real objects, I pretended to be a gourmet, who used the snails solely for gastronomic purposes,—­whereby, Monsieur,” said Cesar Prevost, with a humorous smile, “I was unfortunate enough to inspire the hearty garcons with a supreme contempt for me, and they used to say I ’vas not bettaire zan one blarsted Digger Injun!’ Mon Dieu! what martyrs the votaries of Science have been, always!

“Eh, bien! I shall not bother you with my experiments.  In brief, let me give you only results, so as to be just comprehensible.  Given my law, I had to find, first, the manner exactly in which snails manifest their sympathy, the one for the other,—­c’est a dire, how Snail A tells you that something is happening to his comrade, Snail B. There was a constant law for this, hard to find, but I achieved it. Second, to make my telegraph perfect, and pat my system beyond the touch of accident, I had to discover how to destroy the rapport between Snails A and B. Unless I could do this, I could never be sure my instruments were perfectly isolated, so to speak.  ’Twas a difficult task, Monsieur; for the snail is the most constant in its attachments of all the animal kingdom, and I have known them to die, time and again, because their mates had died,—­