Humorous stories; Mistaken identity -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
I will confide to you an outline of my idea. It is to utilize the spots
on the sun—get control of them, you understand, and apply the
stupendous energies which they wield to beneficent purposes in the
reorganizing of our climates. At present they merely make trouble and
do harm in the evoking of cyclones and other kinds of electric storms;
but once under humane and intelligent control this will cease and they
will become a boon to man.
I have my plan all mapped out, whereby I hope and expect to acquire
complete and perfect control of the sun-spots, also details of the
method whereby I shall employ the same commercially; but I will not
venture to go into particulars before the patents shall have been
issued. I shall hope and expect to sell shop-rights to the minor
countries at a reasonable figure and supply a good business article of
climate to the great empires at special rates, together with fancy
brands for coronations, battles and other great and particular
occasions. There are billions of money in this enterprise, no expensive
plant is required, and I shall begin to realize in a few days—in a few
weeks at furthest. I shall stand ready to pay cash for Siberia the
moment it is delivered, and thus save my honor and my credit. I am
confident of this.
I would like you to provide a proper outfit and start north as soon as
I telegraph you, be it night or be it day. I wish you to take up all
the country stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many
degrees south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can
get now while they are cheap. It is my intention to move one of the
tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will
have the entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next
year, and will use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above
what can be utilized on the equator, to reduce the temperature of
opposition resorts. But I have said enough to give you an idea of the
prodigious nature of my scheme and the feasible and enormously
profitable character of it. I shall join all you happy people in
England as soon as I shall have sold out some of my principal climates
and arranged with the Czar about Siberia.
Meantime, watch for a sign from me. Eight days from now, we shall be
wide asunder; for I shall be on the border of the Pacific, and you far
out on the Atlantic, approaching England. That day, if I am alive and
my sublime discovery is proved and established, I will send you
greeting, and my messenger shall deliver it where you are, in the
solitudes of the sea; for I will waft a vast sun-spot across the disk
like drifting smoke, and you will know it for my love-sign, and will
say “Mulberry Sellers throws us a kiss across the universe.”
APPENDIX.
WEATHER FOR USE IN THIS BOOK.
_Selected from the Best Authorities._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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