“Seat you,” he said.  “No, not in that chair.  That is my Petty Cash Adjuster.”  But he was a second too late.  I had carelessly thrown myself into a chair of seductive appearance.  To my utter amazement it reached out two skeleton arms and clutched me with a grasp against which I struggled in vain.  Then a skull stretched itself over my shoulder and grinned with ghastly familiarity close to my face.

Rivarol came to my aid with many apologies.  He touched a spring somewhere and the Petty Cash Adjuster relaxed its horrid hold.  I placed myself gingerly in a plain cane-bottomed rocking-chair, which Rivarol assured me was a safe location.

“That seat,” he said, “is an arrangement upon which I much felicitate myself.  I made it at Heidelberg.  It has saved me a vast deal of small annoyance.  I consign to its embraces the friends who bore, and the visitors who exasperate, me.  But it is never so useful as when terrifying some tradesman with an insignificant account.  Hence the pet name which I have facetiously given it.  They are invariably too glad to purchase release at the price of a bill receipted.  Do you well apprehend the idea?”

While the Alsatian diluted his glass of Aqua fortis, shook into it an infusion of bitters, and tossed off the bumper with apparent relish, I had time to look around the strange apartment.

The four corners of the room were occupied respectively by a turning-lathe, a Rhumkorff Coil, a small steam-engine and an orrery in stately motion.  Tables, shelves, chairs and floor supported an odd aggregation of tools, retorts, chemicals, gas-receivers, philosophical instruments, boots, flasks, paper-collar boxes, books diminutive and books of preposterous size.  There were plaster busts of Aristotle, Archimedes, and Comte, while a great drowsy owl was blinking away, perched on the benign brow of Martin Farquhar Tupper.  “He always roosts there when he proposes to slumber,” explained my tutor.  “You are a bird of no ordinary mind. Schlafen Sie wohl.”

Through a closet door, half open, I could see a human-like form covered with a sheet.  Rivarol caught my glance.

“That,” said he, “will be my masterpiece.  It is a Microcosm, an Android, as yet only partially complete.  And why not?  Albertus Magnus constructed an image perfect to talk metaphysics and confute the schools.  So did Sylvester II.; so did Robertus Greathead.  Roger Bacon made a brazen head that held discourses.  But the first named of these came to destruction.  Thomas Aquinas got wrathful at some of its syllogisms and smashed its head.  The idea is reasonable enough.  Mental action will yet be reduced to laws as definite as those which govern the physical.  Why should not I accomplish a manikin which shall preach as original discourses as the Rev. Dr. Allchin, or talk poetry as mechanically as Paul Anapest?  My Android can already work problems in vulgar fractions and compose sonnets.  I hope to teach it the Positive Philosophy.”