Wanted, a Separator.
Did you ever see a cranberry-separator? It is a fascinating machine to me, but I am not sure that I can explain it. It is a simple affair to look at, and you think you understand it, but, someway, you don't after all.
It looks not unlike a miniature thresher. On the top at the back is a hopper into which the cranberries are poured, a box full at a time. They are of all sorts, just as they have been pulled from the vines by the rapid little rakes of the cranberry-pickers. Some are decayed. Some are dried up. Some are worm-eaten. Most are hard and firm. There are little stones among them. There are sticks and leaves.
All of this must be sifted, and only the good berries taken out. That is the problem of the machine, and it solves it beautifully. As the handle is turned the mixed-up mess falls down on an upward moving incline made of firm cloth-rubber, if I remember correctly. The hard, solid berries bounce as they fall, and keep bouncing down the incline till they tumble into a box below. The poor berries have no bounce in them, and the stones are too heavy to bounce, and the leaves, of course, do not bounce, so they are all carried up with the moving cloth and fall over its upper edge into another box.
There is more to it than that, of course, but that is the gist of the contrivance, and it is a very shrewd arrangement.
As I look at it I wish that someone would invent a similar machine into which one could put a mess of ideas and turn a crank and sift out the poor ones from the good ones. What a lot of rubbish gets into our scheming brains, and how difficult it often is to distinguish the wise from the unwise, the sound from the foolish! Time is an unfailing separator, to be sure, but his method is a slow and painful one. I want some way of picking out the good plans before they get mixed up with life.
Come to think of it, I believe I have heard of some such machine. It is made by the firm, as I remember it, of Consecration & Commonsense. Have you ever tried it, and does it work?