Just before they set out from San Francisco for the South Seas old
Mr Hurlbird said he must take something with him to make little
presents to people he met on the voyage. And it struck him that
the things to take for that purpose were oranges--because
California is the orange country--and comfortable folding chairs.
So he bought I don't know how many cases of oranges--the great
cool California oranges, and half-a-dozen folding chairs in a
special case that he always kept in his cabin. There must have been
half a cargo of fruit.

For, to every person on board the several steamers that they
employed--to every person with whom he had so much as a
nodding acquaintance, he gave an orange every morning. And
they lasted him right round the girdle of this mighty globe of ours.
When they were at North Cape, even, he saw on the horizon, poor
dear thin man that he was, a lighthouse. "Hello," says he to
himself, "these fellows must be very lonely. Let's take them some
oranges." So he had a boatload of his fruit out and had himself
rowed to the lighthouse on the horizon. The folding chairs he lent
to any lady that he came across and liked or who seemed tired and
invalidish on the ship. And so, guarded against his heart and,
having his niece with him, he went round the world. . . .



He wasn't obtrusive about his heart. You wouldn't have known he
had one. He only left it to the physical laboratory at Waterbury for
the benefit of science, since he considered it to be quite an
extraordinary kind of heart. And the joke of the matter was that,
when, at the age of eighty-four, just five days before poor