e across the gap, stepping lightly upon a
stringpiece probably a foot wide, and proceeding over the ties. Now,
however, he ceased speaking and looked back, for I was no longer beside
him. At the gap I had stopped. I intended to step across, but I did not
propose to do so without giving the matter the attention it seemed to me
to deserve.

Mr. Case did not laugh at me. He came back and stood on the string-piece
where it crossed the opening, telling me to put my hand on his shoulder.
But I did not want to do that. I wanted to cross alone--when I got
ready. It took me perhaps two minutes to get ready. Then I stepped over.
It was, of course, absurdly easy. I had known it would be. But as we
walked along I kept thinking to myself: "I shall have to cross that
beastly place again when we come back," and I marveled the more at the
amazing steadiness of eye and mind and nerve that enables some men to go
continually prancing about over emptiness infinitely more engulfing than
that which had troubled and was troubling me.

Returning I stepped across without physical hesitation. But after I had
crossed I continued to hate that gap. I hated it as I drove back to the
hotel, that afternoon, as I ate dinner that night, as I went to bed, and
in my dreams I continued to cross it, and to see the river waiting for
me, seeming to look up and leer and beckon. I woke up hating the gap in
the bridge as much as ever; I hated it down into the State of
Mississippi, and over into Georgia; and wherever I have gone since, I
have continued to hate it. Of course there isn't any gap there now. It
was covered long ago. Yet for me it still exists, like some obnoxious
person who, though actually dead, lives on in the minds of those who
knew him.

FARTHEST SOUTH

CHAPTER LI

BEAUTIFUL SAVANNAH

How often it occurs that the great work a man set out originally to
accomplish, is lost sight of, by future generations, in contemplation of
other achievements of that man, which he himself regarded as of
secondary importance.

In 1733, the year in which General Oglethorpe started his Georgia
colony, there were more than a hundred offenses for which a person might
be hanged in England; Oglethorpe's primary idea in founding the colony
was to provide a means of freeing debtors from prison, and giving them a
fresh start in life; yet it is as the man responsible for the laying out
of the beautiful city of Savannah, that Oglethorpe is probably most