The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 75: what you’re looking at

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

68 The Wreck of the South Pole. would let them fly from philosophy to poetry and from morals to immortality and back again that no one could fasten upon them. One second I would be planning to stop the moon in her career, and the next formulating a new prayer for the temple or an ode to purity. In this way I secured the name of the Great Dissembler. “You wonder that I did not go crazy. Well, an or- dinary mind would. But I had so strengthened mine by every known means that it stood the strain, and now if any weak mortal has a bit of deviltry he wants done, he comes to me and I do it for him. But always with the understanding that he never thinks of me or it again. To insure this, I tell him I will have nothing to do with it. “And I don’t, unless it is something that will give me amusement. “Tf, however, a person comes to me a second time and I know he cannot keep his mind off the subject, I put him into a hypnotic sleep until the business is over. “Tt helped me in politics, too, as none of my opponents could ever tell what I was going to say or do. In this way I won my way to the leadership of politics and be- came a power in the state. It is true that many people have suspicions of me, and look upon me askance. But what of that? They never can catch me. For weeks at a stretch I have had officers on my trail and, well, I led them a merry dance. I believe their brains were some- what jumbled up at the end of the week. Yes, I rather believe so. How I kept their poor brains on the rack! One minute it would be an abstract problem in mathe- Gomichoo CO