Another person had a scheme for fixing the reflections of objects in
a pool of water, and thus taking the most life-like portraits
imaginable; and the same gentleman demonstrated the practicability
of giving a permanent dye to ladies' dresses, in the gorgeous clouds
of sunset. There were at least fifty kinds of perpetual motion, one
of which was applicable to the wits of newspaper editors and writers
of every description. Professor Espy was here, with a tremendous
storm in a gum-elastic bag. I could enumerate many more of these
Utopian inventions; but, after all, a more imaginative collection is
to be found in the Patent Office at Washington.

Turning from the inventors we took a more general survey of the
inmates of the hall. Many persons were present whose right of
entrance appeared to consist in some crotchet of the brain, which,
so long as it might operate, produced a change in their relation to
the actual world. It is singular how very few there are who do not
occasionally gain admittance on such a score, either in abstracted
musings, or momentary thoughts, or bright anticipations, or vivid
remembrances; for even the actual becomes ideal, whether in hope or
memory, and beguiles the dreamer into the Hall of Fantasy. Some
unfortunates make their whole abode and business here, and contract
habits which unfit them for all the real employments of life.
Others--but these are few--possess the faculty, in their occasional
visits, of discovering a purer truth than the world call impart
among the lights and shadows of these pictured windows.

And with all its dangerous influences, we have reason to thank God
that there is such a place of refuge from the gloom and chillness of
actual life. Hither may come the prisoner, escaping from his dark