Ely’s Automatic Housemaid.[A]
BY ELIZABETH W. BELLAMY.
IN order for a man to have faith in such an invention,he would have to know Harrison Ely.For Harrison Ely was a genius. I had knownhim in college, a man amazingly dull in Latinand Greek and even in English, but with ideasof his own that could not be expressed inlanguage. His bent was purely mechanical, and found expressionin innumerable ingenious contrivances to facilitate the study towhich he had no inclination. His self-acting lexicon-holder was amatter of admiring wonder to his classmates, but it did not serveto increase the tenacity of his mental grasp upon the contents ofthe volume, and so did little to recommend him to the faculty.And his self-feeding safety student-lamp admirably illuminatedeverything for him save the true and only path to an honorabledegree.
It had been years since I had seen him or thought of him, butthe memory is tenacious of small things, and the big yellow envelopewhich I found one morning awaiting me upon my breakfast-tablebrought his eccentric personality back to me with a rush.It was addressed to me in the Archimedean script always socharacteristic of him, combining, as it seemed to do, the principlesof the screw and of the inclined plane, and in its superscriptionHarrison Ely stood unmistakably revealed.
It was the first morning of a new cook, the latest potentate ofa dynasty of ten who had briefly ruled in turn over our kitchenand ourselves during the preceding three months, and successivelyabdicated in favor of one another under the compelling influencesof popular clamor, and in the face of such a political crisismy classmate’s letter failed to receive immediate attention. Unfortunatelybut not unexpectedly the latest occupant of ourculinary throne began her reign with no conspicuous reforms, andwe received in gloomy silence her preliminary enactments in theway of greasy omelette and turbid and flavorless coffee, the yellowscreed of Harrison Ely looking on the while with bilious sympathyas it leaned unopened against the water-bottle beside me.
As I drained the last medicinal drop of coffee my eye fell uponit, and needing a vicarious outlet for my feelings toward the cook,I seized it and tore it viciously open. It contained a letter frommy classmate and half a dozen printed circulars. I spread openthe former, and my eye fastened at once upon this sympatheticexordium:
“Doubtless, my dear friend, you have known what discomfortit is to be at the mercy of incompetent domestics—”
But my attention was distracted at this point by one of thecirculars, which displayed an array of startling, cheering, alluringwords, followed by plentiful exclamation points, that, like a bunchof keys, opened to my enraptured vision the gates of a terrestrialParadise, where Bridgets should be no more, and where ill-cookedmeals should become a mechanical impossibility. The boon wehad been sighing for now presented itself for my acceptance, anaccomplished fact. Harrison Ely had invented “An AutomaticHousehold Beneficent Genius.—A Practical Realization of theFabled Familiar of the Middle Ages.” So the circular set forth.
Returning to the letter, I read that Harrison Ely, having exhaustedhis means in working out his invention, was unable tomanufacture his “machine” in quantity as yet; but that he hadjust two on hand which he would sell in order to raise s