Granted one could be serious, what could be more delightful than to be your own king on your own island?
The comic paragraphers, the business men of “hard, common sense,” the captains of industry who laughed at him and his national resources of buried treasure, turtles’ eggs, and guano, with his body-guard of Zouaves and his Grand Cross of Trinidad, certainly possessed many things that Harden-Hickey lacked. But they in turn lacked the things that made him happy; the power to “make believe,” the love of romance, the touch of adventure that plucked him by the sleeve.
When, as boys, we used to say: “Let’s pretend we’re pirates,” as a man, Harden-Hickey begged: “Let’s pretend I’m a king.”
But the trouble was, the other boys had grown up and would not pretend.
For some reason his end always reminds me of the closing line of Pinero’s play, when the adventuress, Mrs. Tanqueray, kills herself, and her virtuous stepchild says: “If we had only been kinder!”
WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL
IN the strict sense of the phrase, a soldier of fortune is a man who for pay, or for the love of adventure, fights under the flag of any country.
In the bigger sense he is the kind of man who in any walk of life makes his own fortune, who, when he sees it coming, leaps to meet it, and turns it to his advantage.
Than Winston Spencer Churchill to-day there are few young men—and he is a very young man—who have met more varying fortunes, and none who has more frequently bent them to his own advancement. To him it has been indifferent whether, at the moment, the fortune seemed good or evil, in the end always it was good.