"'They don't,' says the man. 'It's a case of "Ill fares the land with
the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain't any
reciprocity."'

"After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him
dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I
couldn't believe him. And a month afterward I landed on the coast of
this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years. I
thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly. I
loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen blankets, wrought-iron
pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies, glass necklaces, and
safety-razors. I hired a black mozo, who was supposed to be a
mule-driver and an interpreter too. It turned out that he could
interpret mules all right, but he drove the English language much too
hard. His name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side
up, but I called him McClintock, which was close to the noise.

"Well, this gold village was forty miles up in the mountains, and it
took us nine days to find it. But one afternoon McClintock led the other
mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across a precipice five
thousand feet deep, it seemed to me. The hoofs of the beasts drummed
on it just like before George M. Cohan makes his first entrance on the
stage.

"This village was built of mud and stone, and had no streets. Some few
yellow-and-brown persons popped their heads out-of-doors, looking about
like Welsh rabbits with Worcester sauce on em. Out of the biggest house,
that had a kind of a porch around it, steps a big white man, red as a
beet in color, dressed in fine tanned deerskin clothes, with a gold