"
And the story would spread! In ever widening circles, men warned by
telegraph of the new wonder would tear open the damp sheets; and pen and
pencil and printing press would hurry to reproduce those marvellous
lines--to-morrow in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Montreal; next day
in Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta; and so on to Denver, Galveston and the
Golden Gate.
The picture--_mine_;--_my picture_!--would be spread on tables
in the low cabins of pilot boats and fishing smacks; it would be nailed to
the log walls of Klondike mining huts; soldiers in the steaming trenches
around Manila would pass the torn sheets from hand to hand, and for a
moment forget their sweethearts while they read of me.
And the ships! The swiftest of them all would carry these pages to London,
Paris, Vienna, there to be multiplied a thousand fold and sent out again
in many tongues. Blue-eyed Gretchen, Giuseppina, with her bare locks and
rainbow-barred apron, slant-eyed O Mimosa San, all in good time would
dream over the fair face on the heralding page; women shut in the zenanas
of the unchanging East would gossip from housetop to housetop of the
wonderful Feringhe beauty; whipped slaves in midmost Africa would carry my
picture in their packs into regions where white men have never trod, and
dying whalers in the far North would look at my face and forget for a
little while their dooming ice floes.
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