that way attracts great
attention, mostly my own.

You would naturally expect, then, to find in me one who has experienced
all manner of disaster at sea and the several kinds of calamity incident
to a life on dry land. It would seem a just inference from my Sole
Survivorship that I am familiar with railroad wrecks, inundations (though
these are hardly dry-land phenomena), pestilences, earthquakes,
conflagrations and other forms of what the reporters delight to call "a
holocaust." This is not entirely true; I have never been shipwrecked,
never assisted as "unfortunate sufferer" at a fire or railway collision,
and know of the ravages of epidemics only by hearsay. The most destructive
_temblor_ of which I have had a personal experience decreased the
population of San Francisco by fewer, probably, than ten thousand persons,
of whom not more than a dozen were killed; the others moved out of town.
It is true that I once followed the perilous trade of a soldier, but my
eminence in Sole Surviving is of a later growth and not specially the
product of the sword.

Opening the portfolio of memory, I draw out picture after
picture--"figure-pieces"--groups of forms and faces whereof mine only now
remains, somewhat the worse for wear.

Here are three young men lolling at ease on a grassy bank. One, a
handsome, dark-eyed chap, with a forehead like that of a Grecian god,
raises his body on his elbow, looks straight away to the horizon, where
some black trees hold captive certain vestiges of sunset as if they had
torn away the plumage of a flight of flamingoes, and says: "Fellows, I
mean to be rich. I shall see every country worth seeing. I shall taste
every pleasure worth having. When old, I shall become a hermit."

Said another slender youth, fair-haired: "I shall become President and
execute a _coup d'etat_ making myself an absolute monarch. I shall then
issue a decree requiring that all hermits be put to death."

The third said nothing. Was he restrained by some prescient sense of the
perishable nature of the material upon which he was expected to inscribe
the record of his hopes? However it may have been, he flicked his shoe
with a hazel switch and kept his own counsel. For twenty years he has been
the Sole Survivor of the group.

* * * * *

The scene changes. Six men are on horseback on a hill--a general and his
staff. Below, in the gray fog of a winter morning, an army, which has left
its in