AND now permit the chronicler of the Absolute to call your attention to his painful situation. First of all, he is in the act of writing Chapter XIII, well aware that this unlucky number will have a fatal influence on the clarity and completeness of his exposition. There is going to be a mix-up of some kind in this unfortunate chapter, you may be sure. Of course, the author could quite calmly head it Chapter XIV, but the observant reader would feel that he had been cheated out of Chapter XIII, and no one could blame him, since he has paid to have the whole narrative. Besides, if you are afraid of the number thirteen, you have only to skip this chapter. It will certainly not cause you to lose much light on the obscure affair of the Factory for the Absolute.

But the other embarrassments of the chronicler are much more serious. He has described as coherently as he could the origin of the factory and its prosperity. He has called your attention to the occurrences due to certain of the Karburator cylinders in Mr. Machat’s buildings, at the Zivno Industrial Bank, in the textile works at Upice, aboard Kuzenda’s dredge, and on Binder’s merry-go-round. He has described the tragic experience of Blahous, the result of long-range infection, induced by the free and mobile Absolute, which had evidently begun to spread in a serious fashion, although after no definite plan.

But now you must remember that since the beginning of the whole affair countless thousands of Karburators of the most diverse types had been manufactured. Trains, flying-machines, automobiles, and ships driven by this most economical of all motors discharged along their routes whole clouds of the Absolute, just as in other days they used to leave a trail of dust, smoke, and smells. You must remember that thousands of factories all over the world had already scrapped their old boilers and equipped themselves with Karburators; that hundreds of Government departments and offices, hundreds of banks, exchanges, wholesale and export firms, as well as huge restaurants, hotels, military barracks, schools, theatres, tenements, thousands of newspaper offices and clubs, cabarets, and households were being heated by the latest M.E.C. Central-Heating Karburator. You must remember that the Stinnes interests with all their ramifications had amalgamated with the M.E.C., and that the American Ford works had flung themselves into mass-production which hurled thirty thousand finished Karburators out upon the world every day.