Mr. Opp

								

memory. "By golly! if the world is as big in every direction as it is in
that, she's a whopper!"
The wind, freshening as they got under way, loosened the canvas
overhead, and Mr. Opp rose to buckle it into place. As he half knelt in
the bow of the boat, he lifted his face to the cool breeze, and took a
deep breath of satisfaction. The prosaic river from Coreyville to the
Cove was the highway he knew best in the world. Under the summer
sunshine the yellow waters lost their sullen hue, and reflected patches
of vivid red and white from the cottages and barns that dotted the
distant shore.
"I don't consider there's any sceneries in the country that'll even
begin to compare with these here," Mr. Opp announced, out of the depths
of his wide experience. "Just look at the sunshine pouring forth around
the point of the island. It spills through the trees and leaks out over
the water just like quicksilver. Now, that's a good thought! It's
perfectly astounding, you might say surprising, how easy thoughts come
to me. I ought to been a writer; lots of folks have said so. Why, there
ain't a day of my life that I don't get a poem in my head."
"Shucks!" observed Jimmy Fallows. "I'd as lief read figgers on a
tow-boat as to read poetry. Old man Gusty used to write poetry, but he
couldn't get nobody to print it, so he decided to start a newspaper at
the Cove and chuck it full of his own poems. He bought a whole printin'
outfit, and set it up in Pete Aker's old carpenter shop out there at the
edge of town, opposite his home. But 'fore he got his paper started he
up and died. Yes, sir; and the only one of his poems that he ever did
git in print was the one his wife had cut on his tombstone."
Mr. Opp was not listening. With his head bared and his lips parted he
was indulging in his principal weakness. For Mr. Opp, it must be
confessed, was given to violent intoxication, not from an extraneous
source, but from too liberal draughts of his own imagination. In
extenuation, the claims of genius might be urged, for a genius he
unquestionably was in that he created something out of nothing. Out of
an abnormal childhood, a lonely boyhood, and a failure-haunted manhood,
he had managed to achieve an absorbing career. Each successive
enterprise had loomed upon his horizon big with possibilities, and
before it sank to oblivion, another scheme, portentous, significant, had
filled its place. Life was a succession of crises, and through them he
saw himself moving, now a shrewd merchant, now a professional man, again
an author of note, but oftenest of all a promoter of great enterprises,
a financier, and man of affairs.
While he was thus mentally engaged in drilling oil-wells, composing
poetry, and selling shoes, Jimmy Fallows was contemplating with
fascinated wonder an object that floated from his coat pocket. From a
brown-paper parcel, imperfectly wrapped, depended a curl of golden hair,
and it bobbed about in the breeze in a manner that reduced Mr. Fallows