The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 91: what you’re looking at

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

84 The Indestructible Story. it over to Chase. It consisted of a number of lead- colored sheets of paper, which had the appearance of having been oiled. Upon it was written: STRANGE STORY OF A COIN. When this MS. is read its writer will be beyond the stars, in paradise, purgatory, or hell. Judging from my luck in this world, | consider my prospects brighter for the last-named place. What I am about to relate is no carefully studied tale. | Three months ago it was entirely unknown to me. As some of my friends—Kent, for instance, who is a great babbler—will no doubt publish it to the world, I have been working for months upon an indestructible sheet of paper, upon which I proposed writing an indestructible story—one which would live forever in spite of various editors of Chicago. I even had a dainty prose poem blocked out for it, when there came a revelation which turned the current of my thoughts in another direction and decided me to give this story to the world instead of one of more literary value, which I could have written myself. I have always had bad luck from the time when a teething babe I got a canker in the mouth by biting on an old coin, down through the days when I was thrashed regularly by my school teacher for other boys’ misde- meanors, down to the present time when, kicked by edi- tors and spurned by “devils,” I am about to bury myself in a country newspaper office in Southern IIlinois. Gomicbook (Eo)