“I’ve been everywhere, and I’ve done everything, almost,” said he. “Put it in the ‘negative case,’ and my history’ll be briefer.”
“I should regard organizing a flambeau brigade,” said I, “as about the last thing you would engage in.”
“Ah!” he replied, “His Whiskers at the hotel told you I called that time, did he? Well, I didn’t think he had the sense. And I doubted the memory on your part, and I wasn’t at all sure you were the real Barslow. But about the flambeaux. The fact is, I had some stock in the flambeau factory, and I was a rabid partisan of flambeaux. They seemed so patriotic, you know, so sort of ennobling, and so convincing, as to the merits of the tariff controversy!”
It was the same old Jim, I thought.
“We used to have a scheme,” I remarked, “our favorite one, of occupying an island in the Pacific,—or was it somewhere in the vicinity of the Spanish Main—”
“If it was the place where we were to make slaves of all the natives, and I was to be king, and you Grand Vizier,” he answered, as if it were a weighty matter, and he on the witness-stand, “it was in the Pacific—the South Pacific, where the whale-oil comes from. A coral atoll, with a crystal lagoon in the middle for our ships, and a fringe of palms along the margin—coco-palms, you remember; and the lagoon was green, sometimes, and sometimes blue; and the sharks never came over the bar, but the porpoises came in and played for us, and made fireworks in the phosphorescent waves....”
His eyes grew almost tender, as he gazed out of the window, and ceased to speak without finishing the sentence,—which it took me some minutes to follow out to the end, in my mind. I was delighted and touched to find these foolish things so green in his memory.
“The plan involved,” said I soberly, “capturing a Spanish galleon filled with treasure, finding two lovely ladies in the cabin, and offering them their liberty. And we sailed with them for a port; and, as I remember it, their tears at parting conquered us, and we married them; and lived richer than oil magnates, and grander than Monte Cristos forever after: do you remember?”
“Remember! Well, I should smile!”—he had been laughing like a boy, with his old frank laugh. “Them’s the things we don’t forget.... Did you ever gather any information as to what a galleon really was? I never did.”
“I had no more idea than I now have of the Rosicrucian Mysteries; and I must confess,” said I, “that I’m a little hazy on the galleon question yet. As to piracy, now, and robbers and robbery, actual life fills out the gaps in the imagination of boyhood, doesn’t it, Jim?”