'I to hear this! I to look over the side; hear my last friend screaming his poor wordless agony; see him look up at me with that supplicating child's eye of his; see him fighting the water despairingly with his little unlearned hands, then go down in a bubbling circle out of sight; I who could not swim a stroke!
'The captain, seeing my distress, humanely put his own boat after the poor creature. With the boat-hook a sailor brought him up after he had gone down for the last time. And thus they laid him on the deck at my feet. I lifted him up; his child eyes were closed, and the golden crown of his fur lay matted and dripping over them. I tried to warm him in my bosom. I laid my hand on his heart: it had stopped.
'Beppo was dead. The Marmoset whom nature had given, only of all, to love the man!
'And I went into Quarantine at Genoa, once more alone in the world.'
'Ciel! and vat you do vith zat cursed Italian?'
'I? Nothing. Ten years afterward I saw him rowing in the galleys at Marseilles. He knew me; I knew him. He smirked as of old, but with such very visible teeth that I was glad he was chained; and passed on without even asking the overseer his crime.
IV.—THE YOUNG MAIDEN'S CHAPTER.
'My wanderings, dating from the day I landed at Genoa, would fill with their narrative a book far larger than 'Livingstone's Travels.' I journeyed over all the traversable regions of Africa; in India I have been wherever the foot of the white man has trodden; I spent a year and a half in China; almost as long in Syria; and I went every where over the continent of Europe. Then I passed six months in Sweden; most of that time living at my native town, Jönpöping, until at last the sound of my mother's tongue spoken by stranger mouths became absolutely unbearable to me, and I left the country never to return. I will see Great Britain, I said. No better place for that purpose, at least to begin with, than London. So I went there; and, with all the curiosities I had collected in my vagabond life, opened a shop as Exhibitor and Taxidermist, in Piccadilly.
'By this time, you will perceive, I had quite abandoned my original idea of returning to America to open a museum. It takes no longer for the world in general; or the world of New-York, to forget its largest man, than for a heaping measure of grain to close up the gap after a hand is withdrawn. And I was a long way from the conceit of fancying myself even a large man. Probably, I said to myself, there are a dozen in my place by this time. I will not go back to revive a name wiped out; it is at least more entertaining to stay here and try chalking out a new one. If I fail, why, the remittances still come regularly.