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INVENTION
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Ernest Conery, an inventor William Herman West
Mrs. Conery, his wife Jane Wolfe
Gladys, their daughter AZice Joyce
Floyd Dandridge, suitor for Gladys' hand Carlyle Blacfcwell
John Rawley, a promoter ■ Paul Hurst
Mark Hunter, co-worker of Rawley 's Kunte Rahm
Economists propound that the source of all wealth is mother earth. Sweaty husbandmen and grimy miners, from time immemorial, have succeeded in breaking the ground that bears it. Countless others have stood by to tread it into wine, crush into meal, saw into logs, or stamp it into an artificial treasure called gold. As the ages have become more enlightened, those that wrest the earth's increase from her have become fewer; those that by increasing processes refine, transmute, adorn, have gone over to the many. From Nature's primitive calls of hunger, love, and terror, have sprung a million words that key our fancies or aversions. The steam-plow of the prairie, with a machinist as plowman, the giant drill with Titanic strokes directed by a fellow machinist, are crowding out the elemental sons of economy. The philosophic miller of the wayside stream is disappearing before the breakfast food magnate. Subtle brain-fingers are quietly atrophying those former digits, which once stood for the supremacy of man. The conquest of the earth's crust is softening; maybe the new process is
happier, too, by means of man's laborsaving devices. Great architecture is no longer a whim, conceived, like the Pyramids, in vanity, and upraised by thousands of slave-toilers.
Thru man's desire to take the shortest road, a breed of specialists gradually grew up: these men are known as bridge builders. Their spawn, who swing, like maniacs, suspended by threads across great chasms, are bridgemen.
The man I am going to tell you about had started adult life as a bridgeman. His life on the chords of steel bridges could be likened to the performances of a trapezist ; but there was no applause, unless we except the echoes of his riveter, from the gorge, and the smiling river coursing below.
When the spring of his sinews had slackened somewhat, and a mist formed before his eyes from the glowing rivets, he had quit the perilous undertaking, to retire with his family to a little house on the outskirts of a town in California.
Tho his outward frame had been discarded as useless to his trade, something big was growing and throbbing inside of him. He had almost per
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