Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/459

 I did not see more experiments of this kind. Whenever I wished anything like it, my friend always referred me to some later time, when he would have all the necessary apparatus and be better skilled. Sometimes he told me that he was engaged in constructing automatons, with the aid of which he expected to perform real “miracles,” and delude entire companies of savants and scientists. He intended to invite a considerable number of friends and lovers of this kind of amusement, and to perform experiments of the most complicated and intricate kinds. He assured me that I would really be surprised; and taking all I saw into account, I could readily judge that he would fulfil his word.

We lived and studied thus for several years. Our study—many-sided at first, afterward one-sided—was not fruitless. Shortly before 1860 our records were so low that we had to stay another year in the same class. We stayed; and at the end of the year we failed again, and next year we failed the third time. The father of my friend, who often jokingly threatened to apprentice his son to a cobbler, if he continued to fail, finally lost all patience, and, in a family conference, it was decreed that the best thing for my friend to do would be to become a soldier. My friend did not object, and a short time afterward called on me dressed in the uniform of a cadet of the foot regiment of Prince Konstantin of Russia.

“Well, what are you doing?” he inquired shaking hands with me.

“I am going to be a carpenter.”

“Forever?”

“I do not know; I am practising now, or, in other words, I am entered as an apprentice, although I have not yet had an axe in my hands.”

“And probably you will never have one,” laughed the young candidate of a bloody trade.

“Maybe,” I replied; “and probably your hands will never touch any of your magic tools any more.”

“Far from it! I have just come to rid you of this rubbish; why, you can hardly move here.”