About one-tenth of the people in Boston are British Canadians, mostly from the Maritime Provinces, an acquisitive prudent folk who see naught to be gained by correcting casual acquaintances who mistake them for down-east Yankees. Often, indeed, they are descendants of Hezekiahs and Priscillas who, having been Royalists during the War of Independence, found subsequent emigration to a British country incumbent on their Puritan consciences. These Americans, returned to the ancestral New England after four or five generations of absence, commonly find Boston ways surprisingly congenial, though they continue to cherish pride in British origin, and a decent warmth of regard for fellow natives of the Maritime Provinces. Hence a known Canadian is frequently addressed by an unsuspected one with, "I am from Canada, too." Having learned this from ten years' experience, I was little surprised when old Adam Bemis, meeting me on the corner of Tremont and Boylston Streets, in May, 1915, stopped and stealthily whispered, "I am from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia."

"Really! I have always taken you for one of the prevalent minority, a man from the State of Maine."

"Most folks do. It doesn't vex me any more. But I've wanted to tell you any time the last ten years."

"Then, why didn't you?"

"It's not my way to hurry. You will understand that well when I explain. I'm needing friendly advice."

He had ever worn the air of preoccupation during our twelve years' acquaintance, but that seemed proper to an inventor burdened with the task of devising and selecting novelties for the Annual Announcement by which Miss Minnely's Prize Package Department furthers the popularity of her famous Family Blessing. The happy possessor of five new subscription certificates, on remitting them to Adam's Department, receives by mail, prepaid, Number 1 Prize Package. Number 2 falls to the collector of ten such certificates; and so on, in gradations of Miss Minnely's shrewd beneficence. The magnifico of one thousand certificates obtains choice between a gasoline auto-buggy and a New England farm. To be ever adding to or choosing from the world's changing assortment of moral mechanical toys, celluloid table ornaments, reversible albums, watches warranted gold filled, books combining thrill with edification, and more or less similar "premiums" to no calculable end, might well account for Old Adam's aspect, at once solemn and unsettled.

"What is your trouble?" I enquired.

"The Odistor. My greatest discovery!" he whispered.

"Indeed! For your Department?"

"We will see about that. It is something mighty wonderful—I don't know but I should say almighty."

"Goodness! What is its nature?"

"I won't say—not here. You couldn't believe me without seeing it work—I wouldn't have believed it myself on anybody's word. I will bring it on to your lodgings—that's a good place for the exhibition. No—I won't even try to explain here—we might be overheard." He glanced up and down Tremont Street, then across—"Sh—there she is herself!" He dodged into a drug store opposite the Touraine.

Miss Mehitable Minnely, sole proprietor of The Family Blessing, was moving imposingly from the Boylston Street front of the hotel toward her auto-brougham. At the top step she halted and turned her cordial, broad, dominant countenance in both directions as if to beam on streets crowded with potential prize-package takers. She then spoke the permitting word to two uniformed deferential attendants, who proceeded to stay her carefully by the elbows, in her descent of the stone steps. Foot passengers massed quickly on both sides of her course, watching her large, slow progress respectfully. When the porters had conveyed her across the pavement, and with deferential, persistent boosting made of her an ample lading for the "auto," the chauffeur touched his wide-peaked cap, and slowly rolled her away towards Brimstone Corner en route to the Blessing Building. Adam came out of the drug store looking relieved.

"She doesn't like to see any of us on the street, office hours," he explained with lips close to my ear. "Not that I ought to care one mite." He smiled somewhat defiantly and added, "To see me dodging the old lady's eye you'd never guess I'm her boss. But I am." He eyed my wonder exultantly and repeated, "It's so. She doesn't know it. Nobody knows, except me. But I am her boss. Just whenever I please."

On my continued aspect of perturbation he remarked, coolly:—"Naturally you think my head is on wrong. But you will know better this evening. I'm the World's boss whenever I choose to take the responsibility. If I don't choose, she goes on being my boss, and, of course, I'll want to hold down my job. Well, good-day for the present. Or, say—I forgot—will it suit you if I come about half-past-five? I can't get there much earlier. She's not too well pleased if any of us leave before Park Street clock strikes five."

"Very well, Mr. Bemis—half past. I shall expect you."

"Expect a surprise, too."

He walked circumspectly across Boylston Street through the contrary processions of vehicles, to the edging pavement of the Common, on his way toward the new Old State House, and Miss Minnely's no less immense Family Blessing Building.

It was precisely twenty-six minutes past five when Adam entered my private office in the rear room of the ground floor of a sky-scraper which overlooks that reach of Charles River lying between the union Boat Club House and the long, puritanic, impressive simplicity of Harvard Bridge. He did not greet me, being preoccupied with the brown paper-covered package under his left arm. With a certain eagerness in his manner, he placed this not heavy burden on the floor, so that it was hidden by the broad table-desk at which I sat. He stooped. I could hear him carefully untie the string and open the clattering paper.

He then placed on the green baize desk-cover a bulbous object of some heavy metal resembling burnished steel. It was not unlike a large white Bermuda onion with a protuberant stem or nozzle one inch long, half-an-inch in diameter, and covered by a metal cap. Obviously; the bulb was of two equal parts, screwed together on a plane at right angles to the perpendicular nozzle. An inch of the upper edge of the lower or basic part was graduated finely as a vernier scale. The whole lower edge of the upper half was divided, apparently into three hundred and sixty degrees, as is the horizontal circle of a theodolite. The parts were fitted with a clamp and tangent screw, by which the vernier could be moved with minutest precision along the graduated circle.

"I was four years experimenting before I found out how to confine it," said Adam.

"What? A high explosive!"

"No—nothing to be nervous about. But what it is I can't exactly say."

"A scientific mystery, eh?"

"It might be called so, seeing as I don't myself know the real nature of the force any more than electricians know what electricity is. They understand how to generate and employ it, that's all. Did you ever see a whirlwind start?"

"No."

"Think again. Not even a little one?"

"Of course I have often seen little whirlwinds on the street carrying up dust and scraps of paper, sometimes dropping them instantly, sometimes whirling them away."

"On calm days?"

"Really I can't remember. But I think not. It doesn't stand to reason."

"That's where you are mistaken. It is in the strongest kind of sunshine on dead calm days that those little whirlwinds do start. What do you suppose starts them?"

"I never gave it a thought."

"Few do. I've given it years of close thinking. You have read of ships on tropic seas in dead calm having top-sails torn to rags by whirlwinds starting 'way up there, deck and sea quiet as this room?"

"I've read of that. But I don't believe all the wonderful items I read in the papers."

"There are more wonders than the papers print. I saw that happen twice in the Indian Ocean, when I was a young man. I have been studying more or less on it ever since. Now I will show you the remainder of my Odistor. I call it that because folks when I was young used to talk of a mysterious Odic force."

To the desk he lifted a black leather grip-sack, as narrow, as low, and about twice as long as one of those in which surgeons carry their implements. From this he extracted a simple-seeming apparatus which I still suppose to have been of the nature of an electric machine. Externally it resembled a rectangular umbrella box of metal similar to that of the bulb. It was about four feet in length and four inches in height and in breadth. That end which he placed nearest the window was grooved to receive one-half the bulb accurately. Clamped longitudinally to the top of the box was a copper tube half-an-inch in exterior diameter, and closed, except for a pinhole sight, at the end farthest from the window. The other, or open end, was divided evenly by a perpendicular filament apparently of platinum.

Adam placed this sighted box on the green baize, its longer axis pointing across the Charles River to Cambridge, through the window. He carefully propped up the wire-net sash. Stooping at the desk he looked through the pin-hole sight and shifted the box to his satisfaction.

"Squint along the line of sight," he said, giving place to me. I stooped and complied.

"You see Memorial Hall tower right in the line?"

"Precisely."

"But what is nearest on the Cambridge shore?"

"The stone revetment wall."

"I mean next beyond that."

"The long shed with the big sign 'Builders' in black letters."

"All right. Sit here and watch that shed. No matter if it blows away. They were going to tear it down anyway." He placed my chair directly behind the sighted tube.

With an access of eagerness in his countenance, and something of tremor apparent in his clutching fingers, he lifted the bulb, unscrewed its metal cap and worked the tangent screw while watching the vernier intently. He was evidently screwing the basal half closer to the nozzle-bearing upper portion.

From a minute orifice in the nozzle or stem something exuded that appeared first as a tiny, shimmering, sunbright, revolving globule. At that instant he placed the bulb on its base in its niche or groove at the outer or window end of the sighted box. Thus the strange revolving globule was rising directly in the line of sight.

"Watch that shed," Adam ordered hoarsely.

I could not wholly take my eyes off the singular sphere, which resembled nothing that I have elsewhere seen so much as a focus of sun rays from a burning glass. But this intensely bright spot or mass—for it appeared to have substance even as the incandescent carbon of an Edison lamp seems to possess substance exterior to the carbon—rose expanding in an increasing spiral within an iridescent translucent film that clung by a tough stem to the orifice of the nozzle, somewhat as a soap-bubble clings to the pipe whence it is blown. Yet this brilliant, this enlarging, this magic globule was plainly whirling on its perpendicular axis as a waterspout does, and that with speed terrific. The mere friction of its enclosing film on the air stirred such wind in the room as might come from an eighteen-inch electric fan. In shape the infernal thing rapidly became an inverted cone with spiral convolutions. It hummed like a distant, idly-running circular saw, a great top, or the far-off, mysterious forewarning of a typhoon.

"Now!" Adam touched a button on the top of the metal box.

The gleaming, whirling, humming, prismatic spiral was then about eighteen inches high. It vanished without sound or spark, as if the film had been totally destroyed and the contained incandescence quenched on liberation. For one instant I experienced a sense of suffocation, as if all the air had been drawn out of the room. The inner shutters clashed, the holland sunshade clattered, the door behind me snicked open, air from the corridor rushed in.

"See the river!" Adam was exultant, but not too excited to replace the metal cap on the nozzle.

Certainly the Charles River was traversed by a gust that raised white caps instantly. A bulk-headed sailing-dory, owned by a union Boat Clubman whom I knew, lay over so far that her sail was submerged, and her centre-board came completely out of water. Only the head and clutching forearms of the two men aboard her could be seen. Afterward they told me they had been quite surprised by the squall. Beyond the Cambridge revetment wall a wide cloud of dust sprang up, hiding the "Builders" shed.

When this structure reappeared Adam gasped, then stood breathless, his countenance expressive of surprise.

He looked down at the Odistor, pondering, left hand fingers pressing his throbbing temple. Lifting the bulb he inspected the vernier, laid it down again, put on his spectacles and once more peered intently at the graduated scale.

"I see," he said, "I was the least thing too much afraid of doing damage in Cambridge back of the shed. But you saw the wind?"

"Certainly I saw wind."

"You know how it started?"

"I don't know what to think. It was very strange. What is the stuff?"

"Tell me what starts the whirlwind or the cyclone, and I can tell you that. All I'm sure of is that I can originate the force, control it, and release it in any strength I choose. Do you remember the chap called ?olus we used to read about in the Latin book at school, he that bagged up the winds long ago? I guess there was truth at the back of that fable. He found out the secret before me, and he used it to some extent. It died with him, and they made a god out of his memory—they had some right to be grateful that he spared them. It must go to the grave with me—so far as I've reasoned on the situation. But that's all right. What's worrying me is the question—Shall I make any use of it?"

"I can see no use for it."

"What! Think again. It is the Irresistible Force. There is no withstanding it. I can start a stronger hurricane than ever yet blew. You remember what happened to that Hawaiian Island in the tornado last year? That was a trifle to what I can do. It is only a matter of confining a larger quantity in a stronger receiver and giving it a swifter send off with a more powerful battery. I can widen the track and lengthen the course to any extent."

"Suppose you can. Still it is only a destroyer. What's the good of it?"

"What's the good of a Krupp gun. Or a shell. Or a bullet?"

"They are saleable."

He looked keenly at me for some seconds. "Do you see that far, or do you only not see how it could be used as a weapon? That's it, eh! Well, I'll tell you. There's England spending more'n ten million dollars a day in the war. Suppose I go to Lord Kitchener. He's a practical, quick man—in half an hour he sees what I can do. 'What will you give,' I ask him, 'to have the Crown Prince and the rest of them Prussians blown clear away?' 'What is your price?' he inquires. 'Ten million pounds would be cheap,' I reply. 'Take five,' he says, 'we are not made of money.' 'Well, seeing it's you,' I tell him."

"It is a considerable discount, Adam. But then you are a British subject."

"Yes—kind of. But the conversation was imaginary. Discount or no discount, I feel no special call to blow away whole armies of Germans. If I could set the Odistor on the Kaiser, and the Crown Prince, and a dozen or so more of the Prussian gang, I'd do it, of course. But how could I find just where they were? Blowing away whole armies of men don't seem right to me."

"But you needn't do that yourself. Sell your secret outright to the British Government."

Adam stared as one truly astonished.

"Now what you think you're talking about?" he remonstrated. "Can't you see farther than that? Suppose I sell the secret to Kitchener. Suppose he clears out all the Germans with it. What next? Why, Ireland! Kitchener is a Jingo Imperialist, which I never was and never will be. I've heard of Jingoes saying time and again that England's interests would be suited if Ireland was ten feet under water. Or suppose he only blows the Irish out of Connaught, just to show the others they'd better cut out the Sinn Finn. What then? First place, I like the Irish. My wife's Irish. Next, consider all the world. Suppose England has got the irresistible weapon. There's no opposing it. Suppose France was to try, some time after this war is over. Away go her cities, farms, vineyards, people, higher than Gilroy's kite. What next? All the rest of the world then know they must do what the English say—Germans, Italians, Russians, Yankees, Canadians. Now I'm a cosmopolitan, I am. All kind of folk look good to me."

"But Engl............