Twelve Men

And yet it seemed to me that a great tragedy had happened—he was so ambitious, so full of plans. His dreams were so near fulfillment.

My feeling at the time was as if I had been looking at a beautiful lamp, lighted, warm and irradiating a charming scene, and then suddenly that it had been puffed out before my eyes, as if a hundred bubbles of iridescent hues had been shattered by a breath.

The day I first saw him he was bent over a drawing-board illustrating a snake story for one of the Sunday issues of the Globe-Democrat, which apparently delighted in regaling its readers with most astounding concoctions of this kind, and the snake he was drawing was most disturbingly vital and reptilian, beady-eyed, with distended jaws, extended tongue, most fatefully coiled.

I could not help laughing, of course. The impertinent air! The grand, almost condescending manner!