Meanwhile, MacShaughnassy said that he knew a story dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was: don't have anything to do with inventions.
Brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a man plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral.

We agreed to hear the particulars, and judge for ourselves.
"This story," commenced MacShaughnassy, "comes from Furtwangen, a small town in the Black Forest.

There lived there a very wonderful old fellow named Nicholaus Geibel.

His business was the making of mechanical toys, at which work he had acquired an almost European reputation.

He made rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a cabbage, flap their ears, smooth their whiskers, and disappear again; cats that would wash their faces, and mew so naturally that dogs would mistake them for real cats, and fly at them; dolls, with phonographs concealed within them, that would raise their hats and say, 'Good morning; how do you do ?' and some that would even sing a song.
"But he was something more than a mere mechanic; he was an artist.