There is a story of two "smart" Yankees, one named Hosea and the other Hezekiah, who met in an oyster shop in Boston. Said Hosea, "As to opening oysters, why nothing's easier if you only know how." "And how's how?" asked Hezekiah. "Scotch snuff," replied Hosea, very gravely-"Scotch snuff. Bring a little of it ever so near their noses, and they'll sneeze their lids off." "I know a man who knows a better plan," observed Hezekiah. "He spreads the bivalves in a circle, seats himself in the centre, reads a chapter of Artemus Ward to them, and goes on until they get interested. One by one they gape with astonishment at A. Ward's whoppers, and as they gape my friend whips 'em out, peppers away, and swallows 'em.
There is a story of two "smart" Yankees, one named Hosea and the other Hezekiah, who met in an oyster shop in Boston. Said Hosea, "As to opening oysters, why nothing's easier if you only know how." "And how's how?" asked Hezekiah. "Scotch snuff," replied Hosea, very gravely-"Scotch snuff. Bring a little of it ever so near their noses, and they'll sneeze their lids off." "I know a man who knows a better plan," observed Hezekiah. "He spreads the bivalves in a circle, seats himself in the centre, reads a chapter of Artemus Ward to them, and goes on until they get interested. One by one they gape with astonishment at A. Ward's whoppers, and as they gape my friend whips 'em out, peppers away, and swallows 'em.
My story opens in the classic presinks of Bostin. In the parler of a bloated aristocratic mansion on Bacon street sits a luvly young lady, whose hair is cuvered ore with the frosts of between 17 Summers. She has just sot down to the piany, and is warblin the popler ballad called "Smells of the Notion," in which she tells how, with pensiv thought, she wandered by a C beat shore. The son is settin in its horizon, and its gorjus light pores in a golden meller flud through the winders, and makes the young lady twict as beautiful nor what she was before, which is onnecessary. She is magnificently dressed up in a Berage basque, with poplin trimmins, More Antique, Ball Morals and 3 ply carpeting. Also, considerable gauze. Her dress contains 16 flounders and her shoes is red morocker, with gold spangles onto them. Presently she jumps up with a wild snort, and pressin her hands to her brow, she exclaims: "Methinks I see a voice!
My story opens in the classic presinks of Bostin. In the parler of a bloated aristocratic mansion on Bacon street sits a luvly young lady, whose hair is cuvered ore with the frosts of between 17 Summers. She has just sot down to the piany, and is warblin the popler ballad called "Smells of the Notion," in which she tells how, with pensiv thought, she wandered by a C beat shore. The son is settin in its horizon, and its gorjus light pores in a golden meller flud through the winders, and makes the young lady twict as beautiful nor what she was before, which is onnecessary. She is magnificently dressed up in a Berage basque, with poplin trimmins, More Antique, Ball Morals and 3 ply carpeting. Also, considerable gauze. Her dress contains 16 flounders and her shoes is red morocker, with gold spangles onto them. Presently she jumps up with a wild snort, and pressin her hands to her brow, she exclaims: "Methinks I see a voice!
As far as I know the first Earl of Whimsey has nothing to do with this story, and so we are not particularly interested in the fact that it was not so much the fine grade of whiskey that he manufactured that won him his earldom as the generous contribution he made to the Liberal party at the time that it was in power a number of years ago. Being merely a simple historian and no prophet, I cannot say whether we shall see the Earl of Whimsey again or not. But if we do not find the Earl particularly interesting, I can assure you that the same may not be said of his fair daughter, Lady Barbara Collis. The African sun, still an hour high, was hidden from the face of the earth by solid cloud banks that enveloped the loftier peaks of the mysterious, impenetrable fastnesses of the forbidding Ghenzi Mountain range that frowned perpetually upon a thousand valleys little known to man. From far above this seeming solitude, out of the heart of the densely banked clouds, there came to whatever ears there might be to hear a strange and terrifying droning, suggesting the presence of a preposterous Gargantuan bumble-bee circling far above the jagged peaks of Ghenzi. At times it grew in volume until it attained terrifying proportions; and then gradually it diminished until it was only a suggestion of a sound, only to grow once again in volume and to again retreat. For a long time, invisible and mysterious, it had been describing its great circles deep in the concealing vapors that hid it from the earth and hid the earth from it. Lady Barbara Collis was worried. Her petrol was running low. At the crucial moment her compass had failed her, and she had been flying blind through the clouds looking for an opening for what now seemed an eternity of hours to her. She had known that she must cross a lofty range of mountains, and she had kept at a considerable altitude above the clouds for this purpose; but presently they had risen to such heights that she could not surmount them; and, foolishly, rather than turn back and give up her projected non-stop flight from Cairo to the Cape, she had risked all in an effort to penetrate them.
Facts alone do not constitute the whole of history, any more than the members of the body form the complete man. There is a soul in history as well as in the body, and it is this which generates, vivifies, and links the facts together, so that they all combine to the same end. The instant we begin to treat of Geneva, which, through the ministry of Calvin, was to become the most powerful centre of Reform in the sixteenth century, one question starts up before us. What was the soul of the Reformation of Geneva? Truly, salvation by faith in Christ, who died to save—truly, the renewal of the heart by the word and the Spirit of God. But side by side with these supreme elements, that are found in all the Reformations, we meet with secondary elements that have existed in one country and not in another. What we discover at Geneva may possibly deserve to fix the attention of men in our own days: the characteristic element of the Genevese Reform is liberty. Three great movements were carried out in this city during the first half of the sixteenth century. The first was the conquest of independence; the second, the conquest of faith; the third, the renovation and organisation of the Church. Berthelier, Farel, and Calvin are the three heroes of these three epics. Each of these different movements was necessary. The bishop of Geneva was a temporal prince like the bishop of Rome; it was difficult to deprive the bishop of his pastoral staff unless he were first deprived of his sword. The necessity of liberty for the Gospel and of the Gospel for liberty is now acknowledged by all thoughtful men; but it was proclaimed by the history of Geneva three centuries ago. But it may be said, a history of the Reformation has no concern with the secular, political, and social element. I have been reproached with not putting this sufficiently forward in the history of the Reformation of Germany, where it had relatively but little importance. I may perhaps be reproached with dwelling on it too much in the Reformation of Geneva, where it holds a prominent place. It is a hard matter to please all tastes: the safest course is to be guided by the truth of principles and not by the exigencies of individuals. Is it my fault if an epoch possesses its characteristic features? if it is impossible to keep back the secular, without wronging the spiritual, element? To cut history in two is to distort it. In the Reform of Geneva, and especially in the constitution of its church, the element of liberty predominates more than in the Reforms of other countries. We cannot know the reason of this unless we study the movement which gave birth to that Reform. The history of the political emancipation of Geneva is interesting of itself; liberty, it has been said,3has never been common in the world; it has not flourished in all countries or in all climates, and the periods when a people struggles justly for liberty are the privileged epochs of history. One such epoch occurred at the commencement of modern times; but strange to say, it is almost in Geneva alone that the struggles for liberty make the earlier decades of the sixteenth century a privileged time.
Down out of Tigre and Amhara upon Gojam and Shoa and Kaffa come the rains from June to September, carrying silt and prosperity from Abyssinia to the eastern Sudan and to Egypt, bringing muddy trails and swollen rivers and death and prosperity to Abyssinia. Of these gifts of the rains, only the muddy trails and the swollen rivers and death interested a little band of shiftas that held out in the remote fastnesses of the mountains of Kaffa. Hard men were these mounted bandits, cruel criminals without even a vestige of culture such as occasionally leavens the activities of rogues, lessening their ruthlessness. Kaficho and Galla they were, the offscourings of their tribes, outlaws, men with prices upon their heads. It was not raining now; and the rainy season was drawing to a close, for it was the middle of September; but there was still much water in the rivers, and the ground was soft after a recent rain. The shiftas rode, seeking loot from wayfarer, caravan, or village; and as they rode, the unshod hoofs of their horses left a plain spoor that one might read upon the run; not that that caused the shiftas any concern, because no one was looking for them. All that anyone in the district wished of the shiftas was to keep out of their way. A short distance ahead of them, in the direction toward which they were riding, a hunting beast stalked its prey. The wind was blowing from it toward the approaching horsemen; and for this reason their scent spoor was not borne to its sensitive nostrils, nor did the soft ground give forth any sound beneath the feet of their walking mounts that the keen ears of the hunter might detect during the period of concentration and mild excitement attendant upon the stalk. Though the stalker did not resemble a beast of prey, such as the term connotes to the mind of man, he was one nevertheless; for in his natural haunts he filled his belly by the chase and by the chase alone; neither did he resemble the mental picture that one might hold of a typical British lord, yet he was that too—he was Tarzan of the Apes. All beasts of prey find hunting poor during a rain, and Tarzan was no exception to the rule. It had rained for two days, and as a result Tarzan was hungry. A small buck was drinking in a stream fringed by bushes and tall reeds, and Tarzan was worming his way upon his belly through short grass to reach a position from which he might either charge or loose an arrow or cast a spear. He was not aware that a group of horsemen had reined in upon a gentle rise a short distance behind him where they sat in silence regarding him intently. Usha, the wind, who carries scent, also carries sound. Today, Usha carried both the scent and the sound of the shiftas away from the keen nostrils and ears of the ape-man. Perhaps, endowed as he was with supersensitive perceptive faculties, Tarzan should have sensed the presence of an enemy; but "Even the worthy Homer sometimes nods.
Mr. Milton Smith, Executive Vice President in Charge of Production, was in conference. A half dozen men lounged comfortably in deep, soft chairs and divans about his large, well-appointed office in the B.O. studio. Mr. Smith had a chair behind a big desk, but he seldom occupied it. He was an imaginative, dramatic, dynamic person. He required freedom and space in which to express himself. His large chair was too small; so he paced about the office more often than he occupied his chair, and his hands interpreted his thoughts quite as fluently as did his tongue. "It's bound to be a knock-out," he assured his listeners; "no synthetic jungle, no faked sound effects, no toothless old lions that every picture fan in the U. S. knows by their first names. No, sir! This will be the real thing." A secretary entered the room and closed the door behind her. "Mr. Orman is here," she said. "Good! Ask him to come in, please." Mr. Smith rubbed his palms together and turned to the others. "Thinking of Orman was nothing less than an inspiration," he exclaimed. "He's just the man to make this picture." "Just another one of your inspirations, Chief," remarked one of the men. "They've got to hand it to you." Another, sitting next to the speaker, leaned closer to him. "I thought you suggested Orman the other day," he whispered. "I did," said the first man out of the corner of his mouth. Again the door opened, and the secretary ushered in a stocky, bronzed man who was greeted familiarly by all in the room. Smith advanced and shook hands with him. "Glad to see you, Tom," he said. "Haven't seen you since you got back from Borneo. Great stuff you got down there. But I've got something bigger still on the fire for you. You know the clean-up Superlative Pictures made with their last jungle picture?" "How could I help it; it's all I've heard since I got back. Now I suppose everybody's goin' to make jungle pictures." "Well, there are jungle pictures and jungle pictures. We're going to make a real one. Every scene in that Superlative picture was shot inside a radius of twenty-five miles from Hollywood except a few African stock shots, and the sound effects—lousy!" Smith grimaced his contempt.
I am no historian, no chronicler of facts, and, furthermore, I hold a very definite conviction that there are certain subjects which fiction writers should leave alone, foremost among which are politics and religion. However, it seems to me not unethical to pirate an idea occasionally from one or the other, provided that the subject be handled in such a way as to impart a definite impression of fictionizing. Had the story that I am about to tell you broken in the newspapers of two certain European powers, it might have precipitated another and a more terrible world war. But with that I am not particularly concerned. What interests me is that it is a good story that is particularly well adapted to my requirements through the fact that Tarzan of the Apes was intimately connected with many of its most thrilling episodes. I am not going to bore you with dry political history, so do not tax your intellect needlessly by attempting to decode such fictitious names as I may use in describing certain people and places, which, it seems to me, to the best interest of peace and disarmament, should remain incognito. Take the story simply as another Tarzan story, in which, it is hoped, you will find entertainment and relaxation. If you find food for thought in it, so much the better. Doubtless, very few of you saw, and still fewer will remember having seen, a news dispatch that appeared inconspicuously in the papers some time since, reporting a rumor that French Colonial Troops stationed in Somaliland, on the northeast coast of Africa, had invaded an Italian African colony. Back of that news item is a story of conspiracy, intrigue, adventure and love—a story of scoundrels and of fools, of brave men, of beautiful women, a story of the beasts of the forest and the jungle. If there were few who saw the newspaper account of the invasion of Italian Somaliland upon the northeast coast of Africa, it is equally a fact that none of you saw a harrowing incident that occurred in the interior some time previous to this affair. That it could possibly have any connection whatsoever with European international intrigue, or with the fate of nations, seems not even remotely possible, for it was only a very little monkey fleeing through the tree tops and screaming in terror. It was little Nkima, and pursuing him was a large, rude monkey—a much larger monkey than little Nkima.
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