He preferred, so they said, to coil himself into a heap and
meditate until the last minute. Then he would produce copy bearing no
sort of relationship to his legitimate work--copy that made the editor
swear horribly, and the readers of _The Call_ ask for more.

I should like to have heard Mark's version of that, with some stories of
his joyous and variegated past. He has been journeyman printer (in those
days he wandered from the banks of the Missouri even to Philadelphia),
pilot cub and full-blown pilot, soldier of the South (that was for three
weeks only), private secretary to a Lieutenant-Governor of Nevada (that
displeased him), miner, editor, special correspondent in the Sandwich
Islands, and the Lord only knows what else. If so experienced a man
could by any means be made drunk, it would be a glorious thing to fill
him up with composite liquors, and, in the language of his own country,
"let him retrospect." But these eyes will never see that orgy fit for
the gods!

THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT

THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT

CHAPTER I

JAN.-FEB., 1888

A REAL LIVE CITY

We are all backwoodsmen and barbarians together--we others dwelling
beyond the Ditch, in the outer darkness of the Mofussil. There are no
such things as commissioners and heads of departments in the world, and
there is only one city in India. Bombay is too green, too pretty, and
too stragglesome; and Madras died ever so long ago. Let us take off our
hats to Calcutta, the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent, as we
drive in over the Hugli Bridge in the dawn of a still February morning.
We have left India behind us at Howrah Station, and now we enter foreign
parts. No, not wholly foreign. Say rather too familiar.

All men of a certain age know the feeling of caged irritation--an
illustration in the _Graphic_, a bar of music or the light words of a
friend from home may set it ablaze--that comes from the knowledge of our
lost heritage of London. At Home they, the other men, our equals, have
at their disposal all that Town can supply--the roar of the streets, the
lights, the music, the pleasant places, the millions of their own kind,
and a wilderness full of pretty, fresh-coloured Englishwomen, theatres
and restaurants. It is their right. They accept it as such, and even
affect to look upon it with contempt. And we--we have nothing except the
few amusements that we painfully build up for ourselves--the dolorous
dissipations of