Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/455

 tempting; and there was not a single day, perhaps, that we did not debate something seemingly beyond solution. This thoughtless, desultory study naturally had no practical ends; but it developed our dialectics and inflamed our fancy, which often performed real wonders in the world of the bizzarre.

To the no small grief of our fathers, neither I nor my friend was very proficient at school. In our “private” studies, however,—that is, in those sciences which we loved above all,—we excelled all our fellow-students. Nature had endowed me with ugliness and my friend with beauty, and our inclinations were similarly dissimilar: I liked dry and tiresome mathematics, whereas my friend preferred the fresh and noble natural sciences. But we were so far from a true scientific course that I really do not know whether I should not regard all we studied then as mere play.

There was, however, some definite end in the studies of my friend. He studied mainly physics, chemistry, mechanics, and a few kindred branches,—but all with a view to escamotage. God knows when and where he conceived the idea of having special talents for escamotage; but from that time nothing interested him unless it had some connection with his hobby. In all his doings he aimed at acquiring skill in that playful pseudo-science, as he called it; and from his favorite sciences he picked out only what was related to it.

His father knew nothing about it, for my friend worked in secret. I was his only confidential friend, and it was in my room that the most varied experiments were performed. Every single penny that my friend could earn or get, he turned toward buying magical tools, or books on escamotage; all of which he deposited in my room. In a few years there were so many curious instruments and appliances heaped within this narrow precinct that it looked very much like the study of a mediæval alchemist.

Pursuing his hobby with zeal, my friend made such rapid progress in escamotage as showed that he was really very gifted. But the more he prospered in his pseudo-science, the more his passion grew; and thus it often happened that while I was busy figuring out how high, under certain conditions, a balloon of a certain weight,