Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/41

 plication. He was never discouraged, for there was always abundant explanation for his repeated failures. Some element was missing, or some other was in excess; it would be easy to remedy these little defects, and with each trial came new light and knowledge. The goal of his hopes and ambition was not far off; it would be reached shortly; and meantime, his only regret was that he had not now the time to publish the wonderful revelations which his absorbing experiments had given him. He had reached the conclusion that his own results would enable somebody else te make the grand success, diamond making, if ke should die before he achieved it for himself.

Diamond making, we used to say, was Barnard's hobby, and the experiments which he made with his odd-shaped retorts and other implements were amusing to his friends, though we refrained from our good natured jests at his expense when we found him in severe earnest. One day he begged from a neighbor a large bombshell that had never been charged and had been kept as a curious relic of the Spanish occupation of California. This he loaded with some curious compound and fused the ingredients by means of a powerful galvanic battery; the shell, though enclosed in a welded crust of iron, exploded in fragments, broke the windows of his neighbors and brought the doctor into disrepute. He was threatened with an indictment as a nuisance if he contined his "dratted experiments," and for a time the ardent disciple of science lost some of his popularity. The mixture with which he charged his bombsheil, by the way, was known only to himself; in a moment of inspiration he seemed to have conceived the idea that certain materials fused under great pressure would secure the desired result; but what those ingredients were he never told. When questioned as to where he found the formula for their

composition he would evade the matter, but finally admitted that it had been "revealed" to him, though whether the revelation was made by spirits from the unseen world or by his own research, or by Nature herself, in a moment of unusual confidence, he would never say; it was sufficient for us to know that he had the infallible and only reliable recipe for compounding the diamond, or rather, for resolving from carbon its purest form—the diamond.

His chief anxiety now was where to find an implement or machine to hold the explosion while he fired his mixture under pressure. In reply to the suggestion that the same spirits who were kind enough to give him the information which enabled him to mix the ingredients, ought to furnish him with the requisite machinery for a successful test of their value, he only laughed good humoredly and said that man must work out some part of his problem himself. He was sensitive to any jocular remarks about the supernatural agency which was employed in his experiments, and though he began to have some traces of respect for the "spiritual manifestations" which were then beginning to attract attention in the country, he steadily declined to say what his chemical formula was or where he got it, except that "it was revealed." His wife asked no questions, but put her trust implicitly in her husband, as she had always done.

Barnard lost a little of his rotundity, and his features grew a trifle sharper, as he prosecuted his fascinating search for the proper machinery for his great experiment. As years rolled by and his bursted &nvils, broken retorts and shattered cannon-balls only brought fresh disappointments, he grew a shade paler and more anxious, but his fine flow of spirits never forsook him. He had a revelation that he would succeed, and his enthusiasm was still quenchless. He never had any more doubt of his