a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with
hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall
club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at
every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused,
in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from
your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of
woe still worse than yours--worse with all the accumulated interest of
long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by
the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of
your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in
the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!

* * * * *

And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen
sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I
take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress
you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and
somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during
your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my
best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible
phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have
unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once
deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense--mere
common-sense--it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect
education. I am but a poor scribe!

Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most
important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to
us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been