I copy it down here because
it seems to me that it is the fittest beginning to the history
that I am about to write, if it please God to spare me to finish
it. If not, well it does not matter. That extract was penned
seven thousand miles or so from the spot where I now lie painfully
and slowly writing this, with a pretty girl standing by my side
fanning the flies from my august countenance. Harry is there
and I am here, and yet somehow I cannot help feeling that I am
not far off Harry.
When I was in England I used to live in a very fine house --
at least I call it a fine house, speaking comparatively, and
judging from the standard of the houses I have been accustomed
to all my life in Africa -- not five hundred yards from the old
church where Harry is asleep, and thither I went after the funeral
and ate some food; for it is no good starving even if one has
just buried all one's earthly hopes. But I could not eat much,
and soon I took to walking, or rather limping -- being permanently
lame from the bite of a lion -- up and down, up and down the
oak-panelled vestibule; for there is a vestibule in my house
in England. On all the four walls of this vestibule were placed
pairs of horns -- about a hundred pairs altogether, all of which
I had shot myself.
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