It was important to insist on the remarkable mathematical powers of J. T. Maston. We have done so! Now we have to show him at work, and to do that we must go back a few weeks.
About a month before the famous advertisement, J. T. Maston had been requested to work out the elements of the project of which he had suggested to his colleagues the marvellous consequences.
For many years he had lived at No. 179, Franklin Street, one of the quietest streets in Baltimore, far from the business quarter, for in commerce he took no interest; far from the noise of the crowd, for the mob he abhorred.
There he occupied a modest habitation known as Ballistic Cottage, living on the pension he drew as an old artillery officer, and on the salary paid him as the Gun Club secretary. He lived alone with one servant, Fire-Fire, a name worthy of an artilleryman’s valet. This negro was a servant of the first-water, and he served his master as faithfully as he would have served a gun.
J. T. Maston was a confirmed bachelor, being of opinion that bachelorhood is the only state worth caring about in this sublunary sphere. He knew the Sclav proverb, that a woman draws more with one hair than four oxen in a plough; and he was on his guard.
If he was alone at Ballistic Cottage, it was because he wished to be alone. He had only to nod to change his solitude of one into a solitude of two, and help himself to half the fortune of a millionaire. There was no doubt of it. Mrs. Scorbitt would only have been too happy; but J. T. Maston was not going to be too happy; and it seemed that these two people so admirably adapted for each other—in the widow’s opinion—would never understand each other.
The cottage was a very quiet one. There was a groundfloor and a first-floor. The ground floor had its verandah, its reception-room and dining-room, and the kitchen in a small annexe in the garden. Above them was a bedroom in front, and a workroom facing the garden away from the noise, a _buen retiro_ of the savant and the sage within whose walls were solved calculations that would have raised the envy of a Newton or a Laplace.
Different, indeed, was the home of Mrs. Scorbitt, in the fashionable quarter of New Park, with the balconies on its front covered with the fantastic sculpture of American architecture, Gothic and Renascence jumbled together; its enormous hall, its picture galleries, its double twisted staircase, its numerous domestics, its stables, its coach-houses, its gardens, its lawns, its trees, its fountains, and the tower which dominated its battlements from the summit of which fluttered in the breeze the blue and gold banner of the Scorbitts.