We are all different, and often our differences are of the widest. Some men
can be knocked prostrate by the most trifling disappointment, while others
can extract comfort or even positive benefit from what looks like complete
disaster--such as the Cambridge youth I met last week, raving about
TURNER'S "Fighting Téméraire."
"But I didn't know you were interested in pictures," I said.
"Oh, yes, I've always been, in a way," he replied; "but it wasn't till the
rain ruined the first day of the Varsity match that I ever had a real
chance to get to the National Gallery, and when it came down like blazes
again on Tuesday I went back there. Did you ever see such painting? And the
pathos of it too! And then that frosty morning scene in the same room! Why,
TURNER was too wonderful."
How some of the other dampened enthusiasts tided over their loss I can only
guess; but this ardent one reminded me of the Shipwrecked Entomologist, and
I placed him on a niche somewhere near that radiant soul.
And who was he?
Well, he was the curator of his own department in some Indian museum--I
think at Calcutta--and when the time came for his holiday he took a passage
for Japan on a little tramp steamer. Everything went well until a few hours
out of Shanghai, when a typhoon began to blow with terrific force. The ship
was driven on the coast of Korea, where she set about breaking up, and only
with the greatest difficulty did the passengers and crew get to shore,
bruised and saturated, without anything but their clothes and what their
pockets could hold. Some lives were lost, but my man was saved.
It was a desolate part, with nothing but the poorest huts for shelter,
dirty and verminous, so that the discomforts of the land were almost equal
to the perils of the sea.
Naturally, on his return to Calcutta the curator was plied with questions.
How did be feel about it? Wasn't it an awful experience? If ever a man
deserved sympathy it was he. And so forth. But he wouldn't rise.
"Sympathy?" he said. "Good Heavens! I don't want sympathy. Why, I had the
time of my life. Do you know that during the night in that Korean hovel I
found five absolutely new kinds of bug."