"perfeck," for in consequence of working with a crank the article was cranky, and always put on either too much or too little of the heat-affording mineral, while it had been known to scatter a knubbly shower all over the hearthrug. But scarcely anything had taken up more of Mr Dodd's attention, than the springs which opened and closed his doors. He very reasonably said that such a trivial matter might easily be worked by machinery sympathising with the approaching feet; but in spite of all his care and trouble, the springs beneath the boards of the floor would not be regulated to the required strength, they would go either too stiffly or too easily. Now this was very often most troublesome, as exemplified upon one occasion, when Mr Dodd was bowing out a lady visitor, taking leave with her husband. The owner of the inventions stood too long upon the spring board, and just in the midst of one of his most profound bows, clap-to came the door, shooting Mr Dodd forward, as if out of a Roman catapult, and making him butt his male friend, ram fashion, right in the region known to us in school days as "the wind," when the effects were most disastrous: the gentleman's watch-glass was broken, and the visitor doubled up in the large umbrella-stand, with his internal inflatable organs in a state of vacuum, while by the recoil, Mr Dodd came down in a sitting posture upon the door mat, where he remained staring at his collapsed friend until he thought better of it, and helped him to rise. He was often on the very point of becoming a martyr to science was Mr Dodd, and never nearer than upon one dismal, dreary, snowy, scrawmy morning, one of those cheerful times when people are wont to feel put out with everything and everybody--a sort of three-cornered time--a Boxing-day in fact, when, after a little extra jollity on the previous night, there was a strong suspicion of headache and disordered liver. Mr Dodd began the day all askew, by getting out of bed the wrong way, and then felt as if all the skin was off his temper which as naturally became chafed, as that people who have sore places, manage to hit them in preference to other parts of their body however sound. Everything went wrong with Mr Dodd upon that morning. His shaving water was nearly cold, and in spite of the patent guard razor, Mr Dodd cut himself severely; then there was hard water in place of soft, in the ewer, and his face was chapped with the previous day's cutting wind; he felt as if he had taken cold, for the ventilator had not closed when Mr Dodd went to bed, even when he stood upon a chair and hammered it with a poker; while, worse than all, an irritating cough tickled and tormented him, tried as it was by the smoke which ascended the staircase and penetrated his bedroom. Descending at last through the clouds, like an angry Jove, Mr Dodd encountered Mary, housemaid, with an angry--"Where does all this smoke come from?"