* * * * *

At the last moment I see a probability of a complication which causes me much uneasiness.  Please subscribe quickly.  Address to the Mansion-House, care of the Lord Mayor, whom I will instruct to receive names and subscriptions for me until I can organise a committee.

Footnotes

{1} The last part of Chapter XXIII in this Gutenberg eText.—­DP.

{2} See Handel’s compositions for the harpsichord, published by Litolf, p. 78.

{3} The myth above alluded to exists in Erewhon with changed names, and considerable modifications.  I have taken the liberty of referring to the story as familiar to ourselves.

{4} What a safe word “relation” is; how little it predicates! yet it has overgrown “kinsman.”

{5} The root alluded to is not the potato of our own gardens, but a plant so near akin to it that I have ventured to translate it thus.  Apropos of its intelligence, had the writer known Butler he would probably have said—­

   “He knows what’s what, and that’s as high,
   As metaphysic wit can fly.”

{6} Since my return to England, I have been told that those who are conversant about machines use many terms concerning them which show that their vitality is here recognised, and that a collection of expressions in use among those who attend on steam engines would be no less startling than instructive.  I am also informed, that almost all machines have their own tricks and idiosyncrasies; that they know their drivers and keepers; and that they will play pranks upon a stranger.  It is my intention, on a future occasion, to bring together examples both of the expressions in common use among mechanicians, and of any extraordinary exhibitions of mechanical sagacity and eccentricity that I can meet with—­not as believing in the Erewhonian Professor’s theory, but from the interest of the subject.