From death my mind leaped, oddly enough, to drownings. How should one
go about resuscitating a man who has been pulled out of the river? He
must be rolled on a barrel, of course; that much I remembered. But was
it face down or face upward? And should his arms be pumped vertically up
and down, or horizontally away from the body and back? Yes, and how if
some intelligent foreigner were to ask me what our five principal cities
were, in the order of population? It would be easy enough to begin, New
York, Chicago, Philadelphia--and then? Was it Boston, or Baltimore, or
San Francisco? I did not know.
There was no stopping now. I was fast in my own clutches. I bit at my
cigar, and tried to call the roll of the seven wise men of Greece. I
stopped at the first, Solon. He, I remembered, rescued the Athenians
from misgovernment and slavery, and left the city before they could
experience a change of heart and hang him.
Who were the nine muses? Well, there was Terpsichore--her disciples are
spoken of every day in the newspapers. And then there was the muse of
History, whose name possibly was Thalia, and the muse of Poetry, whose
name I could not recall.
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