Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/647

 ledge of music and of professional musicians which had won for him some respect among those of his fellow passengers who did not know the difference between a hurdy-gurdy and a hautboy, and were therefore fond of posing as musical critics. He was a shrewd, good-tempered colonel, and the bar-keeper said that he was the most elegant, high-toned gentleman he had ever crossed with.

"Electricity, gentlemen," resumed the Colonel, "is the biggest thing of the century, but it has its drawbacks. Did any of you ever happen to ride on that electric railroad in Berlin? Well, I have, and most anybody who goes to Berlin is liable to ride on it. It taught me, however, that a man ought to be pretty careful when he trusts himself in an electric car.

"It happened in this way. I was an agent in the general show business, and was collecting an opera company for a friend of mine who was going to open in Chicago. I had come across a first-class tenor—found him in a country church choir in Germany and was bringing him home with me under a contract, when he and I took that ride on that Berlin electric road. He was a careless sort of chap, and he sat down in a corner of the car where the electricity had been leaking, and the seat was pretty wet."

"I never knew before," remarked the young man, "that electricity could make a seat wet."

"Probably not," retorted the Colonel. "I should judge that there might be a right smart lot of things that you mightn't know. Most of these gentlemen here, however, have probably heard that nowadays electricity is put up for use in bottles and metallic cans. It stands to reason that anything capable of being put into a bottle is capable of leaking, and wetting whatever it leaks on. If there is anybody here who knows more about bottles than I do, I'm ready to let him tell this story.

"As I was saying, my man sat down in a sort of pool of electric fluid, and sat there for about half an hour. He was wearing in the fob pocket of his trousers a cheap silver watch. I had given it to him so that he might get some exercise, and prevent himself from getting too fat. He never suspected my motive, but he tired himself all out winding it up for two hours every night. Now you may not believe it, but I give you my word that the electricity completely dissolved that watch case, and deposited the silver around the man's waist. He didn't find it out till night, and you never saw a man so scared as when he found that there was a band about four inches wide silver-plated all round his waist. The doctor told him that the only possible way of getting it off would be to dissolve it with acid, but that the acid would eat clean through to his spine and injure his voice. So my tenor had to let bad enough alone, and be satisfied with another ten-and-sixpenny gymnasium, that I gave him to mollify his feelings.

"We came over on the Arizona, and it got around during the passage that my man was silver-plated. There was a Custom-house spy on board, and so it happened that after the tenor had sworn that he had nothing dutiable with him, the inspector ordered him to strip and be personally ex-