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 pains of production and shower the blessings of every kind of happiness upon them. They only forget completely that machines too may prove ungrateful children.

"In their crass credulity they let themselves be lulled to sleep by the illusion that machines are but lifeless things, unable to react against their creators, things that can be thrown away when one has got sick of them. Lord, what idiots! Have you ever observed a big gun, most reverend Sir? Would you ever think even that an inanimate thing? I tell you, not even a General is so lovingly cared for. A General may catch a cold, and nobody will worry about it. But big guns are wrapped up in stout coverings that they may not get rheumatic—or rusty, which is the same thing—and they are provided with hats, that it may not rain down their muzzles.

"Of course you could object that a cannon will not roar if it is not stuffed with powder and before the signal to fire is given. But does an operatic tenor begin to roar before his cue is given? And does he go off if he has not been filled before sufficiently with musical notes? I tell you, in the whole world's expanse there is not a single really dead thing."

"But our own sweet home the moon," suavely piped Dr. Haselmayer—"isn't she an extinct astral body; isn't she dead?"

"She is not dead," Monseigneur informed him. "She is but the face of death. She is but—how shall I call it?—the collecting-lens which, like a magic lantern, concentrates the life-giving rays of that damned insolent sun for an inverted work, projecting by her witchcraft all kinds of magic imagery out of the brains of the living into the seeming reality,