You would naturally expect, then, to find in me one who has experienced
all manner of disaster at sea and the several kinds of calamity incident
to a life on dry land. It would seem a just inference from my Sole
Survivorship that I am familiar with railroad wrecks, inundations (though
these are hardly dry-land phenomena), pestilences, earthquakes,
conflagrations and other forms of what the reporters delight to call "a
holocaust." This is not entirely true; I have never been shipwrecked,
never assisted as "unfortunate sufferer" at a fire or railway collision,
and know of the ravages of epidemics only by hearsay. The most destructive
_temblor_ of which I have had a personal experience decreased the
population of San Francisco by fewer, probably, than ten thousand persons,
of whom not more than a dozen were killed; the others moved out of town.
It is true that I once followed the perilous trade of a soldier, but my
eminence in Sole Surviving is of a later growth and not specially the
product of the sword.
Opening the portfolio of memory, I draw out picture after
picture--"figure-pieces"--groups of forms and faces whereof mine only now
remains, somewhat the worse for wear.
Here are three young men lolling at ease on a grassy bank. One, a
handsome, dark-eyed chap, with a forehead like that of a Grecian god,
raises his body on his elbow, looks straight away to the horizon, where
some black trees hold captive certain vestiges of sunset as if they had
torn away the plumage of a flight of flamingoes, and says: "Fellows, I
mean to be rich.
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