“He seized her by her white arms, and forced her back behind the orange trees.  ‘Do you know why?’ he said, speaking slowly and distinctly; ’because I feared that, with him dead, you would want me to marry you, and that, talked about as we have been, I might find it awkward to avoid doing so; because I feared that, without him to stand between us, you might prove an annoyance to me—­perhaps come between me and the woman I love, the woman I am going back to.  Now do you understand?’

“‘Yes,’ whispered the woman, and he left her.

“But there are only two people,” concluded Jephson, “who do not regard his saving of the husband’s life as a highly noble and unselfish action, and they are the man himself and the woman.”

We thanked Jephson for his story, and promised to profit by the moral, when discovered.  Meanwhile, MacShaughnassy said that he knew a story dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was:  don’t have anything to do with inventions.

Brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a man plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral.  We agreed to hear the particulars, and judge for ourselves.

“This story,” commenced MacShaughnassy, “comes from Furtwangen, a small town in the Black Forest.  There lived there a very wonderful old fellow named Nicholaus Geibel.  His business was the making of mechanical toys, at which work he had acquired an almost European reputation.  He made rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a cabbage, flap their ears, smooth their whiskers, and disappear again; cats that would wash their faces, and mew so naturally that dogs would mistake them for real cats, and fly at them; dolls, with phonographs concealed within them, that would raise their hats and say, ‘Good morning; how do you do?’ and some that would even sing a song.

“But he was something more than a mere mechanic; he was an artist.  His work was with him a hobby, almost a passion.  His shop was filled with all manner of strange things that never would, or could, be sold—­things he had made for the pure love of making them.  He had contrived a mechanical donkey that would trot for two hours by means of stored electricity, and trot, too, much faster than the live article, and with less need for exertion on the part of the driver; a bird that would shoot up into the air, fly round and round in a circle, and drop to earth at the exact spot from where it started; a skeleton that, supported by an upright iron bar, would dance a hornpipe; a life-size lady doll that could play the fiddle; and a gentleman with a hollow inside who could smoke a pipe and drink more lager beer than any three average German students put together, which is saying much.

“Indeed, it was the belief of the town that old Geibel could make a man capable of doing everything that a respectable man need want to do.  One day he made a man who did too much, and it came about in this way.