Simon Wheeler backed nie into a corner and blockaded me there
with his chair, and then sat down and reeled ofif the monotonous
narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he
never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing
key to which he tuned his initial sentence, he never betrayed the
slightestsuspicion of enthusiasm ; but all through the interminable
narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity,
which showed me plainly that, so far fiom his imagining that
there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he
regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two
heroes as men of transcendent genius in Suesse. I let him goon in
his own way, and never int-errupted him once.
"Rev. Leonidas W. H'm, Reverend Le— well, there was a feller
here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49 — or may
be it was the spring of '50—1 don't recollect exactly, somehow,
though what makes me think it was one or the other is because I
remember the big flume warn't finished when he first came to the
camp; but any way, he was the curiosest man about always bet-
ting on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get any-
body to beton the other side; and if he couldn't he'd change sides.
