Quite absorbed by his idea, Planchette took an empty flower-pot, with
a hole in the bottom, and put it on the surface of the dial, then he
went to look for a little clay in a corner of the garden. Raphael
stood spellbound, like a child to whom his nurse is telling some
wonderful story. Planchette put the clay down upon the slab, drew a
pruning-knife from his pocket, cut two branches from an elder tree,
and began to clean them of pith by blowing through them, as if Raphael
had not been present.
"There are the rudiments of the apparatus," he said. Then he connected
one of the wooden pipes with the bottom of the flower-pot by way of a
clay joint, in such a way that the mouth of the elder stem was just
under the hole of the flower-pot; you might have compared it to a big
tobacco-pipe. He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, in
a shovel-shaped mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider end of it,
and laid the pipe of the elder stem along the portion which
represented the handle of the shovel. Next he put a lump of clay at
the end of the elder stem and therein planted the other pipe, in an
upright position, forming a second elbow which connected it with the
first horizontal pipe in such a manner that the air, or any given
fluid in circulation, could flow through this improvised piece of
mechanism from the mouth of the vertical tube, along the intermediate
passages, and so into the large empty flower-pot.
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