and wait. That is all we do and that is my life at Key West. I
get up and half dress and take a plunge in the bay and then dress fully
and have a greasy breakfast and then light a huge Key West cigar, price
three cents and sit on the hotel porch with my feet on a rail-- Nothing
happens after that except getting one's boots polished as the two
industries of this place are blacking boots and driving cabs. I have
two boys to black mine at the same time every morning and pay the one
who does his the better of the two-- It generally ends in a fight so
that affords diversion-- Then a man comes along, any man, and says,
"Remmington's looking for you" and I get up and look for Remington.
There is only a triangle of streets where one can find him and I call
at "Josh" Curry's first and then at Pendleton's News Store and read all
the back numbers of the Police Gazette for the hundredth time and then
call here at the Custom House and then look in at the Cable office,
where Michaelson lives sending telegrams about anything or nothing and
that brings me back to the hotel porch again, where I have my boots
shined once more and then go into mid-day dinner. In the meanwhile
Remington is looking for me a hundred yards in the rear. He generally
gets to "Josh's" as I leave the Custom House-- In the afternoon I study
Spanish out of a text book and at three take a bicycle ride, at five I
call at the garrison to take tea with the doctor and his wife, who is
sweeter than angel's ever get to be with a miniature angel of a baby
called Martha. I wait until retreat is sounded and the gun is fired at
sunset and having commented unfavorably on the way the soldiers let the
flag drop on the grass instead of catching it on the arms as a
bluejacket does, I ride off to the bay for another bath-- Then I take
the launch to the Raleigh and dine with the officers and rejoice in the
clean fresh paint and brass and decks and the lights and black places
of a great ship of war, than which nothing is more splendid. We sit on
the quarter-deck and smoke and play the guitar and I go home again, in
time for bed. I vary this programme occasionally by spending the
morning on the end of a wharf watching another man fish and reading old
novels and the "Lives of Captain Walker" and "Captain Fry of the
Virginius," two great books from each of which I am going to write a
short story like the one of the Alamo or of the Jameson Raid-- The life
of Walker I found on the R