A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

14 A QUEFR RACE. as boatswain; and the latter was so much occupied that he had barely time to call aud say ‘* good-bye” the day before the Diana was towed out tosea. Idid not see him again for several months, in circumstances which I shall presently relate. CHAPTER III. NIL DESPERANDUM. AND now I think it is time I told how it came to pass that, at an age when most young men of my years have only just left college or begun business, I was a profes- sional underwriter, and virtually the manager of the Oriental and Occidental Insurance Company. My father was a merchant, and for many years a partner in the house of Waterhouse, Watkins, Erle & Co., who traded principally with the West Indies and South America, though being very catholic in their commercial ideas, they would have shipped coals to Newcastle, or warming-pans to Madagascar, if they had been sure about their reimbursement, and could have seen a trifling profit on the venture. My father, who was the traveling member of the firm, went about a good deal ‘‘drumming” for fresh business, and at one period of his life spent several years at Maracaibo, in Venezuela—a fact which accounts for my having been born there. Now, anybody who goes to Maracaibo as surely gets a touch of yellow fever as any- body who stays a winter in London gets a taste of yellow fog. It is a matter of course, and new-comers make their arrangements accordingly. My parents underwent the ordeal the year before I came into the world, which circumstance was supposed to confer on me a complete immunity from this terrible pest of the tropics. J was acclimatized by the mere fact of my birth. I cannot say that I esteemed the privilege very highly, for I had not the most remote intention of returning to Maracaibo, which from all accounts is a pestiferous, mosquito-haunted pandemonium. My poor father used to say that whatever else he might leave me, he should at least leave me free from all fear of Yellow Jack. As it turned out, he left me little else. After his re- Gom C JOO SS (