"The big scene?" said Halsey, half musingly. "No! Maybe not. We don't know what there may be on ahead." "Isn't that the truth!" assented John Rawn graciously. "When a man of brains and energy gets his start, there's no telling where he won't go, or what he won't do. Yes, that's the truth!" CHAPTER X THE WOODSHED IN KELLY ROW I The one astonishing thing about life, as we have but now mentioned, is its utter commonplaceness. It is a terrible thing to die, to end our connection with life as we know it; yet folk die, and the world accepts the fact with not more than a few hours' concern. Folk are born, a very wonderful thing, yet a common. We flash messages across the sea--as soon we shall across the ether, to other planets. The latter event will be but of brief interest. We travel by impounded steam, and have long ago ceased to marvel at that miracle. Soon we will travel by means of other power, at speeds inconceivable to-day. Were that time here we would not wonder. It is all, all commonplace. And none of us does much thinking. It is only over the unimportant things that we ponder. Thus, over a revolution in politics we chatter excitedly; but the revolution in principles excites us not at all. The revolution in science, in thought, in life, is accepted, when it comes, with no concern, as though belonging to us from time immemorial; as indeed it did. It was wholly within human practice that affairs should now go on at Kelly Row much as they had always gone, in spite of the fact that Kelly Row now harbored, in a certain woodshed back of the dingy Rawn abode, ideas and deeds that had not earlier been known in Kelly Row routine. Here Mr. Rawn and his intending son-in-law were carrying on experiments whose most immediate result, in case of success, would be the extrication of Mr. Rawn from rather an awkward situation; because, although Mr. Rawn, in the usual and commonplace human fashion, had taken as his own an idea when he saw it, he negligently had done so forgetful of the fact that it still lacked many features as a definite commercial proposition. II