hall dressed for legerdemain, and if you pause to think you will
note a strange wizardry at work there. You linger before a little
printing-press, and as if magical clouds rose and shut out the
work-day world, the skies of Greece are overhead and the Ancient
searching for his lever with which to move the world passes down the
room and lingers with you; for surely he has found the lever, and
surely the world has been moved with it, the boundaries of empires
broken up, kings discrowned, republics ruined. Go farther: a case
of toys: harmless trifles enough, arrests you--cannon a finger long,
batteries the size of a lady's spool-stand, but the reduced models of
death-dealing engines whose power of wholesale slaughter may one day
revolutionize the codes of nations and abolish warfare. In another
case you observe only a lump of coal, a phial of pitch, a flask of
oil; and the necromancer of the place has dipped his rod down into the
central darkness of the earth and drawn up light like the day's. Yet
beyond: an iron stirrup and a slender spur, and the sewing-girl has
but to set her foot there and escape the shapes that dog her. Not far
away, again, we remember the Oriental magician, who as often as
the king cut off his head grew another in its place, as we see the
machinery for a feat almost as wonderful in the exact anatomy of steel
springs and leather ligaments made to fit upon the very nerves of
volition themselves, till the halt walk and the maimed are made whole.
In this spot is the jar into which the fisherman shut the afrite; in
that are the great genii who gather in a harvest; and in still another
there lies a tiny thing answering your touch with no louder noise than
a buzz and a click, but its whisper can be heard from end to end of
the land, and it runs beneath the roar of ocean to carry the voice
of one world to another. In fact, within these crystal cells the
intelligence of all our millions is concreted; and it is no wonder
that in the face of the marvels here inventors are sometimes seized