erhaps it was because it came as such a grim reality
after the trifling grotesqueries of the night before. At any rate, as I
heard it this morning it seemed as terrible as anything in Tolstoi's
_Heart of Darkness_, and more than once sent my thoughts back to the
sorrows of the house of OEdipus. It startled me a little, too, for I
never thought to catch an echo of Greek tragedy out of the full soft
lips of a Finnish girl who was helping me wash my breakfast dishes.

It began as I was deciding on my dinner menu, and looked to see if all
our mushrooms had been used up. That prompted me to ask the girl why she
never ate them. I could see a barricaded look come into her eyes but she
merely shrugged and said that sometimes they were poison and killed
people. I told her that this was absurd and that any one with ordinary
intelligence soon got to know a meadow mushroom when he saw one. But
sometimes, Olga insisted, they were death cups. If you ate a death cup
you died, and nothing could save you. I tried to convince her that this
was just a peasant superstition, but she announced that she had seen
death cups, many of them, and had seen people who had been killed by
them. And then brokenly, and with many heavy gestures of hesitation, she
told me the story.

Nearly seventy miles northwest of us, up near her old home, so she said,
a Pole named Andrei Przenikowski and his wife used to live. They had one
son, whose name was Jozef. They were poor, always poor, and could never
succeed. So when Jozef was fifteen years old he went to the coast to
make his fortune. And the old father and mother had a hard time of it,
for old Andrei found it no easy thing to get about, having had his feet
frozen years before. He stumped around like a hen with frost-bitten
claws, Olga said, and his wife, old as she was, had to help him in the
fields. One whole winter, he told Olga's father, they had lived on
turnips. But season after season dragged on, and still they existed, God
knows how. Of Jozef they never heard again. But with Jozef himself it
was a different story. The boy went up to Alaska, before the days of the
Klondike strike. There he worked in the fisheries, and in the lumber
camps, and still later he joined a mining outfit. Then he went in to the
Yukon.

That was twelve years after he had first left home. He was a strong man
by this time and spoke English very well. And the next year he struck
luck, and washed up a great deal of gold, thousa