THIRTY YEARS AGO, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. You would not have guessed that in infancy he had suckled at the breast of a hideous, hairy she-ape, nor that in all his conscious past since his parents had passed away in the little cabin by the landlocked harbor at the jungle's verge, he had known no other associates than the sullen bulls and the snarling cows of the tribe of Kerchak, the great ape.
WILL THERE BE ANY YODELERS IN GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST SKIN
Just to have seen him there, lolling upon the swaying bough of the jungle-forest giant, his brown skin mottled by the brilliant equatorial sunlight which percolated through the leafy canopy of green above him, his clean-limbed body relaxed in graceful ease, his shapely head partly turned in contemplative absorption and his intelligent, gray eyes dreamily devouring the object of their devotion, you would have thought him the reincarnation of some demigod of old. Or at least so thought Tarzan of the Apes, who squatted upon a low-swinging branch in a near-by tree and looked down upon her. TEEKA, STRETCHED AT luxurious ease in the shade of the tropical forest, presented, unquestionably, a most alluring picture of young, feminine loveliness. But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this property and if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark, that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a baby, I have not come into it yet. I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result. In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Fri-day night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I re-cord that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. I Am Born Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Horses, scarcely better splashed to their very blinkers. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
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