The Adventurer

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Title:     The Adventurer
Author: Walt Mason [More Titles by Mason]

He had braved the hungry ocean when the same was in commotion, he had floated on the wreckage of his tempest-shattered bark; he had flirted in deep waters with the merman's wives and daughters, he had scrapped through seven sessions with a large man-eating shark.

He had roamed in regions polar, where there's no effulgence solar, he had slain the festive walrus and the haughty arctic bear; and his watchword had been spoken in the wastes by whites unbroken, and he shelled out many gumdrops to the natives living there.

In the jungles, dark and fearful, where the tiger, fat and cheerful, gnaws the bones of foreign hunters, he had gone, unscathed, his way; he had whipped a big constrictor, and emerged the smiling victor from a scrimmage with a hippo, which was fond of deadly fray.

He was shot with poisoned arrows and his tale of anguish harrows up the bosom of the reader, but he lived to journey home; he was chased by wolves in Russia, thrown in prison cell in Prussia, and was captured by fierce bandits in the neighborhood of Rome. He had lived where dwells the savage whose ambition is to ravage and to fill his cozy wigwam with a handsome line of scalps; he had lived with desert races, sought the strange and distant places, he had stood upon the summit of the loftiest of Alps.

To his home at last returning, filled with sentimental yearning, "Now," he cried, "farewell to danger--I have left its stormy track!" Far from scenes of strife and riot he desired long years of quiet, but a casting from an airship fell three miles and broke his back.

[The end]
Walt Mason's poem: Adventurer

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