Once more the poor fellow is back at his home in fair Provence, and
sees the sun-dial that stood in his childhood's garden; sees part
of his mother, and the long-since-forgotten face of that little
dead sister (he sees her, he says, on a Sunday morning, for all the
church bells are ringing); he looks up and down through the
universe, and owns it well piled with bales upon bales of cotton,
and cotton eternal--so much so that he feels, he knows, he swears
he could make that winning hazard, if the billiard table would not
slant upwards, and if the cue were a cue worth playing with; but it
is not--it's a cue that won't move--his own arm won't move--in
short, there's the devil to pay in the brain of the poor Levantine,
and perhaps the next night but one he becomes the "life and the
soul" of some squalling jackal family who fish him out by the foot
from his shallow and sandy grave.
Better fate was mine. By some happy perverseness (occasioned
perhaps by my disgust at the notion of being received with a pair
of tongs) I took it into my pleasant head that all the European
notions about contagion were thoroughly unfounded; that the plague
might be providential or "epidemic" (as they phrase it), but was
not contagious; and that I could not be killed by the touch of a
woman's sleeve, nor yet by her blessed breath.
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