"I have been served infamously, often, in modern and semi-modern times.
I have been compelled by base men to create fraudulent history, and to
perpetrate all sorts of humbugs. I wrote those crazy Junius letters, I
moped in a French dungeon for fifteen years, and wore a ridiculous Iron
Mask; I poked around your Northern forests, among your vagabond Indians,
a solemn French idiot, personating the ghost of a dead Dauphin, that the
gaping world might wonder if we had 'a Bourbon among us'; I have played
sea-serpent off Nahant, and Woolly-Horse and What-is-it for the museums;
I have interviewed politicians for the Sun, worked up all manner of
miracles for the Herald, ciphered up election returns for the World,
and thundered Political Economy through the Tribune. I have done all the
extravagant things that the wildest invention could contrive, and done
them well, and this is my reward--playing Wild Man in Kansas without a
shirt!"

"Mysterious being, a light dawns vaguely upon me--it grows apace--what
--what is your name."

"SENSATION!"

"Hence, horrible shape!"

It spoke again:

"Oh pitiless fate, my destiny hounds me once more. I am called. I go.
Alas, is there no rest for me?"

In a moment the Wild Man's features seemed to soften and refine, and his
form to assume a more human grace and symmetry. His club changed to a
spade, and he shouldered it and started away sighing profoundly and