A retired middle-aged gentleman and his wife take a long walk, arm-in-arm, many miles, up hills, across fields, with a laden knapsack and a heavy picnic basket, and yet they are completely at ease because of the gentleman's invention, a negative gravity device, which they carry to lighten their weight. He uses the device to help with farm work. The gentleman later uses the device on a mountain climb and amazes an unknowing Alpine-club member with his speed and agility on a difficult mountain climb in spite of his carrying a heavy load and not looking particularly strong. He realizes the invention has tremendous financial potential. However, this invention gets him into a humorous predicament and causes a problem for his family, which he resolves in an unexpected way. This light-hearted short story was first published in a collection by Frank R. Stockton entitled The Christmas Wreck and Other Stories (New York, 1886), an imaged copy of which is available at The Internet Archive.
About the Author: Frank Richard Stockton (April 5, 1834 - April 20, 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century and for his short story "The Lady, or the Tiger?" (1882) which has been called the most famous riddle mystery of all time. Stockton avoided the didactic moralizing common to children's stories of the time, instead using clever humor to poke at greed, violence, abuse of power and other human foibles, describing his fantastic characters' adventures in a charming, matter-of-fact way in stories like "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" (1885) and "The Bee-Man of Orn" (1887), which was published in 1964 in an edition illustrated by Maurice Sendak. "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" won a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963. His 1895 adventure novel The Adventures of Captain Horn was the third-best selling book in the United States in 1895. Born in Philadelphia in the year 1834, Stockton was the son of a prominent Methodist minister who discouraged him from a writing career. After he married Mary Ann Edwards Tuttle, the couple moved to Nutley, New Jersey. For years he supported himself as a wood engraver until his father's death in 1860. In 1867, he moved back to Philadelphia to write for a newspaper founded by his brother. His first fairy tale, "Ting-a-ling," was published that year in The Riverside Magazine. His first book collection appeared in 1870. He died in 1902 of cerebral hemorrhage and is buried at The Woodlands in Philadelphia.