Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

808 thinly disguised beneath sweet sirups and nuts and fruit. The establishment is owned and run by a busy, elderly body called Mother Bain. If I have grasped, from hearsay, her charac- ter correctly, she possesses an unflagging and never failing inventiveness and her con- coctions, whatever else they may lack, are never guilty of the stigma of sameness. It further seems that Mother Bain is endowed with an unerring intuition as to the probable trend in flavors that the palate of the student body will take for each forth- coming week, and rarely does she find any surplus of stock left souring upon her hands. Her life is not precisely a bed of roses, but inasmuch as she has the advantage of being not only an institution but a monopoly she is succeeding quite well in feathering the nest into which she ultimately plans to re- tire and sink. The meeting between Ramier and Drusil- la—it was much too formal to call it a tryst, to say nothing of its publicity—took place at the Kitchen the same evening as their discussion on the campus. It was followed at increasingly frequent intervals by others, until the departure of Professor Kretjz was counterbalanced, and Drusilla’s and Ra- mier’s respective pursuits of science went on as strenuously as if no such detail as a wrecked laboratory had given them pause. Nor were they satisfied with mere discus- sions alone. Ramier, with his income, which was a hundred times too large for any student, was not the young lad to be put out by the blowing up of a laboratory. He arranged to outfit one of his own; one where Drusilla and he could continue their experiments with bases and reagents and whatever cabalistic properties that their desperate thirsts for knowledge might desire. Mother Bain, as Ramier found out upon inquiry, possessed a back parlor—in the fullest sense of the word—that connected with her shop. It was quite suitable to Ra- _mier’s purpose, but Mother Bain was frank- ly skeptical, and said so, as to whether Ramier’s purpose was quite suitable to her back parlor. The persuasive rent of thirty dollars a week convinced her that it was. All of which brings us down to the state- ment I made at the start of this digression ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. that it has never failed to strike me as ab- surd that Ramier’s stupendous discovery should have originated in five corks, with needles stuck through them, and a bar magnet. The five corks were suspiciously easy to supply, as were the five needles, thanks to Drusilla, who kept a package of them for props rather than for sewing—an art with which in those days she had small patience —but the immediate demand for a basin that would hold about a quart of water was more difficult to meet. The laboratory contained any number of other things, but it did not contain a basin. Under the spell of the fine fervor of the experiment, both Ramier and Drusilla were impatient at being balked, and Ramier, hastening into the shop portion of the Kitchen, demanded a basin of the very first person whom he saw. This happened to be Billy Preston, who was engaged in reflectively eating a Dark- town Special. This, I believe, is a confec- tion remotely connected with chocolate ice cream—say, a cousinship, many times re- moved. Billy Preston was furthermore one of the ten students who had been, figurative- ly speaking—at least at first—sitting at Pro- fessor Kretjz’s feet when the enthusiastic savant had done his best to blow them to pieces. ‘““Have you a china or porcelain basin that will hold about a quart of water?” demanded Ramier intensely as he came to a full stop beside the small, round table and glared down at Billy in the manner of one distracted scientist to another. Now Billy, at heart, was not much of a scientist. I really believe—although he steadfastly refuses to admit it—that he was secretly glad that the laboratory had been wrecked. He certainly had no intention whatever of being interrupted in the con- sumption of his Darktown Special for any- thing so trivial as a basin. It was much too expensive a dish to receive amy thing scowled heavily at Ramier with the upper portion of his face. ee “Go a-glu-way,” he said steele and waved a just emptied spoon in a significant gesture of dismissal. Oo CO COnnicoolk<s