I hated
your father with an undying hate, Miss Brent.
"Well, to make the sad story short, I took my wife and children and
sailed secretly for the farthermost parts of the world. Off the coast of
Madagascar, in the Straits, a typhoon came up. The vessel was driven on
the rocks and wrecked. I was cast ashore, and I vaguely remember how,
for days and weeks, I patrolled that beach, subsisting on shell-fish,
imploring God, day and night, to restore my wife and children to me.
Then my mind gave way.
"The natives took me in, thinking me a god. They took me many miles
inland. Savages, the world over, are superstitious about the demented,
and so they treated me kindly. They installed me in a thatched hut of my
own and made me a leader.
"How many months, years, I stayed with them I do not know. But, true to
my mechanical instinct, I rigged up a forge and improved many of the
crude instruments of the natives, principally those of agriculture.
"But transcending every other feeling, I hated Brent. In my madness, I
conceived the idea that I would construct an iron giant that, upon its
completion, if I could only procure the brain of a man who had died of a
lightning stroke or other electric agency, I could, by installing this
brain in the brain cavity of the giant, give it volition, make it a
superman without feeling or conscience.
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