John Brent. Theodore Winthrop

      Chapter I • Auri Sacre Fames

      Auri Sacre Fames

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      I write in the first person; but I shall not maunder about myself. I am in no sense the hero of this drama. Call me Chorus, if you please—not Chorus merely observant and impassive; rather Chorus a sympathizing monitor and helper. Perhaps I gave a certain crude momentum to the movement of the play, when finer forces were ready to flag; but others bore the keen pangs, others took the great prizes, while I stood by to lift the maimed and cheer the victor.

      It is a healthy, simple, broad-daylight story.

      No mystery in it. There is action enough, primeval action of the Homeric kind. Deeds of the heroic and chivalric times do not utterly disdain our day. There are men as ready to gallop for love and strike for love now, as in the age of Amadis.

      Roughs and brutes, as well as gentlemen, take their places in this drama. None of the characters have scruples or qualms. They act according to their laws, and are scourged or crowned, as their laws suit Nature’s or not.

      To me these adventures were episode; to my friend, the hero, the very substance of life.

      But enough backing and filling. Enter Richard Wade—myself—as Chorus.

      A few years ago I was working a gold-quartz mine in California.

      It was a worthless mine, under the conditions of that time. I had been dragged into it by the shifts and needs of California life. Destiny probably meant to teach me patience and self-possession in difficulty. So Destiny thrust me into a bitter bad business of quartz mining.

      If I had had countless dollars of capital to work my mine, or quicksilver for amalgamation as near and plenty as the snow on the Sierra Nevada, I might have done well enough.

      As it was, I got but certain pennyworths of gold to a most intolerable quantity of quartz. The precious metal was to the brute mineral m the proportion of perhaps a hundred pin-heads to the ton. My partners, down in San Francisco, wrote to me: “Only find twice as many pin-heads, and our fortune is made.” So thought those ardent fellows, fancying that gold would go up and labor go down—that presently I would strike a vein where the mineral would show yellow threads and yellow dots, perhaps even yellow knobs, in the crevices, instead of empty crannies which Nature had prepared for monetary deposits and forgotten to fill.

      So