Solitude and Company 187 



mineral. This man took too much on 

 trust, and lacked an examining habit An- 

 other spent quite a sum in digging a deep 

 well, only to find that he could not pump 

 water from it, because a pump will suck 

 water for only thirty feet, as his book on 

 physics would have told him. It was a 

 different sort of mechanic who repaired a 

 pneumatic tube. This had become choked, 

 and to tear it to pieces would have been 

 troublesome and expensive ; so a pistol 

 was fired at one end and the echo was 

 timed. Knowing that sound moves eleven 

 hundred and forty-two feet a second, he 

 measured the place of the obstruction by 

 the time it took for sound to travel there 

 and back again, and the tube was opened 

 within a few feet of the arrested parcel. 



I confess that this yarn sounds a little 

 like those tremendous moralities of early 

 Sunday-school literature ; but if not true it 

 is good enough to be. It may have been 

 told to incite the readers and listeners to 

 virtuous emulation, modern science being 

 somewhat dogmatic in its attitude, and 

 standing almost as a substitute for ethics. 



