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The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale

L. Frank Baum · 1901 · 34,774 words

A boy who sounds the master key of electricity learns that hidden powers demand a wisdom humanity has not yet reached.

Editor’s note: several episodes depict non-European peoples through dated racial stereotypes, reproduced unaltered for historical fidelity and not endorsed by the Library.

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Opening

Who Knows?

These things are quite improbable, to be sure; but are they impossible?

Our big world rolls over as smoothly as it did centuries ago, without a squeak to show it needs oiling after all these years of revolution. But times change because men change, and because civilization, like John Brown's soul, goes ever marching on.

The impossibilities of yesterday become the accepted facts of to-day.

Here is a fairy tale founded upon the wonders of electricity and written for children of this generation. Yet when my readers shall have become men and women my story may not seem to their children like a fairy tale at all.

Perhaps one, perhaps two—perhaps several of the Demon's devices will be, by that time, in popular use.

Who knows?

"In wonder all philosophy began; in wonder it all ends; and admiration fills up the interspace. But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance: the last is the parent of adoration."

—COLERIDGE.

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Contents

  1. Who Knows?
  2. Chapter One — Rob's Workshop
  3. Chapter Two — The Demon of Electricity
  4. Chapter Three — The Three Gifts
  5. Chapter Four — Testing the Instruments
  6. Chapter Five — The Cannibal Island
  7. Chapter Six — The Buccaneers
  8. Chapter Seven — The Demon Becomes Angry
  9. Chapter Eight — Rob Acquires New Powers
  10. Chapter Nine — The Second Journey
  11. Chapter Ten — How Rob Served a Mighty King
  12. Chapter Eleven — The Man of Science
  13. Chapter Twelve — How Rob Saved a Republic
  14. Chapter Thirteen — Rob Loses His Treasures
  15. Chapter Fourteen — Turk and Tatar
  16. Chapter Fifteen — A Battle with Monsters
  17. Chapter Sixteen — Shipwrecked Mariners
  18. Chapter Seventeen — The Coast of Oregon
  19. Chapter Eighteen — A Narrow Escape
  20. Chapter Nineteen — Rob Makes a Resolution
  21. Chapter Twenty — The Unhappy Fate of the Demon

About this edition

Source: Project Gutenberg #45347

Public domain: First published 1901; public domain in the United States.

What’s included: The complete text.

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