W. L. Alden

“ He now saw his way to make that eye useful, and to give himself the most convenient light that a man ever had. His idea was to make a glass eye with an incandescent fibre in the middle of it, and to run it by a storage battery in his waistcoat pocket. So he went to work, and, being a very ingenious workman, as well as a man brimful of science, he turned out a glass eye that couldn't be distinguished from a natural one, so far as appearances went, and that had an electric light of six candle-power in the middle of it. ”

“ There was one person in the Professor's family who didn't like the electric light business. That was Mrs. Van Wagener. She was a woman of a great deal of character, people said, and, of course, we all know that when a woman is said to have a great deal of character, what is meant is that she can make herself mighty disagreeable, and generally does it. Mrs. Van Wagener always disliked her husband's scientific habits. She used to say that some men were kept up late at night by whiskey, and some by science, but of the two she preferred the man who went in for whiskey. ”

“ Professor Van Wagener had a cat that he considered to be an animal of considerable taste for science, and nothing would satisfy him till he had provided the cat with an electric head-light. He had considerable difficulty in fastening the light on the cat's head, for, although she had always seemed to take a good deal of interest in watching him experimenting with different sorts of things in his chemical laboratory, she drew the line at electricity and objected to being lighted up like the rest of the people in the house. ”