far-off region of fever and swamp, of sun
and sea, of adventure and blood, and old buccaneering, standing by
those swift waters, already on their way thither! Should I go? Was
I not too good to go, and be lost? Think of the high moral
considerations involved? No matter, I didn't go--I came! Well!

"On reflection--and I thus assume that I do reflect--I think men don't
find opportunities, or, if they do, they don't know them. One must
make an opportunity for himself, and then he will know what to do with
it. The other day I stood on the other side of the Chagrin waiting for
an opportunity, and it didn't come, and I made one. I waded through,
and liked it, and that was not the only lesson I learned at the same
time. But that other was for my personal improvement. A man can as
well find the material for his opportunity in one place as another.
See how I excuse myself!

"Just now, I am a reformed young Blue Beard. Fatima and her sister may
go--have gone. I have just overhauled my 'Blue Chamber,' taken down
all my suspended wives, and burned them. They ended in smoke. Lord!
there wasn't flesh and blood enough in them all to decompose, and they
gave out no odor even while burning. I burned them all, cleaned off
all the blood-spots, ventilated the room, opened the windows, and will
turn it to a workshop. No more sighing for the unattainable, no more
grasping at the intangible, no more clutching at the impalpable. I am
no poet, and we don't want poetry. Our civilization isn't old enough.
Poets, like other maggots, will be produced when fermentation comes.
I am going about the humdrum and the useful. I am about as low in
the public estimation as I can well go; at any rate I am down on hard
land, which will be a good starting-point. Now don't go off and become
sanguine over me, nor trouble yourself much about me.

"'The world will find me after many a day,' as Southey says of one of
his books. I doubt if it ever did. The Doctor contends that Southey
was a poet; but then he thinks I am, also!

"What a deuce of a clamor is made about this new comet or planet! What
a useful thing to us poor, mud-stranded mortals to find out that there
is another little fragment of a world, away some hundreds of
millions of miles, outside of no particular where--for I believe
this astronomical detective is only on its track! The Doctor is in
ecstacies over it, takes it as a special personal favor, and declaims
luminously and constellationally abo