Solander's Radio Tomb

_"Pigs Is Pigs" Butler quite surpasses himself in this story. The
intricacies in radio are so great, and the changes occur so quickly
that no one can afford to make a will wherein a radio provision
figures. Once we thought of having a radio loud speaker installed in
our coffin to keep us company and make it less lonesome. After
reading this story we quickly changed our mind. The possibilities
are too various._


I first met Mr. Remington Solander shortly after I installed my first
radio set. I was going in to New York on the 8:15 A.M. train and was
sitting with my friend Murchison and, as a matter of course, we were
talking radio. I had just told Murchison that he was a lunkheaded noodle
and that for two cents I would poke him in the jaw, and that even a
pin-headed idiot ought to know that a tube set was better than a crystal
set. To this Murchison had replied that that settled it. He said he had
always known I was a moron, and now he was sure of it.

"If you had enough brains to fill a hazelnut shell," he said, "you
wouldn't talk that way. Anybody but a half-baked lunatic would know that
what a man wants in radio is clear, sharp reception and that's what a
crystal gives you. You're one of these half-wits that think they're
classy if they can hear some two-cent station five hundred miles away
utter a few faint squeaks. Shut up! I don't want to talk to you. I don't
want to listen to you. Go and sit somewhere else."

Of course, this was what was to be expected of Murchison. And if I did
let out a few laps of anger, I feel I was entirely justified. Radio fans
are always disputing over the relative merits of crystal and tube sets,
but I knew I was right. I was just trying to decide whether to choke
Murchison with my bare hand and throw his lifeless body out of the car
window, or tell him a few things I had been wanting to say ever since he
began knocking my tube set, when this Remington Solander, who was
sitting behind us, leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. I
turned quickly and saw his long sheeplike face close to mine. He was
chewing cardamon seed and breathing the odor into my face.

[Illustration: Outraged citizens were removing their dead.]

"My friend," he said, "come back and sit with me; I want to ask you a
few questions about radio."