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In November the general conducted his hundred or more human derelicts to Port Royal, and, going up the stream, chose the site for his city of Savannah, and laid it out in liberal parallelograms. While it was building he tented beneath a quartette of primeval pines, and exchanged friendly greetings and promises with the various Indian tribes who sent deputies to him.
But, seeing that these derelicts are human beings and not farm stock, we bestow upon them a sneer, or possibly a pittance by way of alms, and pass on our complacent ways. Looking upon the imperfect passersby, the observer is reminded of the tens of thousands of children who are defective in mind and body and are hidden away from public gaze, a charge upon the resources of the state.
Harte's demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the soil, "Alkali Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono Jim;" fierce, shy, profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills, who each owned, or had owned, a mine and was wishful to own one again.
New tribes of Indians from down the coast had moved thither, babies and baggage, and they were growing rich. The stampede itself resembled the spring run of the silver salmon it was equally mad, equally resistless. It was equally wasteful, too, for birds and beasts of prey fattened upon it and the outsetting current bore a burden of derelicts.
Here the merchant seldom closes his shop till the band goes home. Music arouses the romantic, and the romantic temperament is always easy to swindle, and the merchant of Venice will swindle you if he can. The two women saw no vacant tables at Florian's, but presently they espied the other derelicts O'Mally, Smith, and Worth who managed to find two extra chairs.
Haswell called for whiskey, and was served by a waiter in a spotted apron, whose dank hair fell over a sallow and oily face. Save for himself, there were only four other customers. In a corner partition a slovenly woman in bedraggled finery berated the man who sat with bloated eyes across from her. The waiter looked on sardonically. At another table were two derelicts from one of the Garden side shows. A truculent and beady-eyed dwarf whose face hardly showed above the boards was brow-beating a cringing giant of unbelievable immensity. "You crabbed my act, you big stiff," shrilled the midget truculently and his huge vis-
But to rush, at the speed at which we were travelling, into the heart of that pitchy blackness was nerve-racking work, for although the chart assured us that we had a clear sea for some hundreds of miles ahead, there were still such possibilities as derelicts to be reckoned with, and under such circumstances as I have been endeavouring to describe, if an obstacle of any sort should happen to be in our way, to avoid it would be a sheer impossibility, while to strike it would mean for us simply destruction.
Had some catastrophe occurred in the outer realms of Space in which some other world had been involved in fiery ruin, or had the comet been dragged away from its orbit by the attraction of one of those dead suns, those derelicts of Creation which, dark and silent, drift for age after age through the trackless ocean of Immensity?
I make friends with lonely derelicts whose digestions have foundered on seas of vichy and buttermilk, and I show them the joys of alcoholism without cost. We share each other's pleasures and perplexities, at my expense. They are my brothers. I am optimistic; I laugh; I play cards for money; I turkey-trot.
In this institution I met for the first time one of the geniuses of the present age, a man who spent his life working not with clay or marble, or wood or metal, but with human beings, taking the derelicts of life and moulding them into useful vessels Sir Arthur Pearson, a true miracle worker, a man who has given the equivalent of eyes to hundreds of blind people, who has enabled many men who felt themselves down and out to face life's battle bravely, teaching them to look upon their affliction as nothing more than a petty handicap.
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