Everywhere on the surface of the glassy stream were visible undulations of heat, and the light steam of evaporation lay along the sluggish water and hung like a veil between the eye and the bank.  Seated in an armchair and overcome by the heat and the droning of some prosy passengers near by, I fell asleep.  When I awoke the guards were crowded with passengers in a high state of excitement, pointing and craning shoreward.  Looking in the same direction I saw, through the haze, the sharp outlines of a city in gray silhouette.  Roofs, spires, pinnacles, chimneys, angles of wall—­all were there, cleanly cut out against the air.

“What is it?” I cried, springing to my feet.

“That, sir,” replied a passenger stolidly, “is Poughkeepsie.”

It was.

A SOLE SURVIVOR

Among the arts and sciences, the art of Sole Surviving is one of the most interesting, as (to the artist) it is by far the most important.  It is not altogether an art, perhaps, for success in it is largely due to accident.  One may study how solely to survive, yet, having an imperfect natural aptitude, may fail of proficiency and be early cut off.  To the contrary, one little skilled in its methods, and not even well grounded in its fundamental principles, may, by taking the trouble to have been born with a suitable constitution, attain to a considerable eminence in the art.  Without undue immodesty, I think I may fairly claim some distinction in it myself, although I have not regularly acquired it as one acquires knowledge and skill in writing, painting and playing the flute.  O yes, I am a notable Sole Survivor, and some of my work in that way attracts great attention, mostly my own.

You would naturally expect, then, to find in me one who has experienced all manner of disaster at sea and the several kinds of calamity incident to a life on dry land.  It would seem a just inference from my Sole Survivorship that I am familiar with railroad wrecks, inundations (though these are hardly dry-land phenomena), pestilences, earthquakes, conflagrations and other forms of what the reporters delight to call “a holocaust.”  This is not entirely true; I have never been shipwrecked, never assisted as “unfortunate sufferer” at a fire or railway collision, and know of the ravages of epidemics only by hearsay.  The most destructive temblor of which I have had a personal experience decreased the population of San Francisco by fewer, probably, than ten thousand persons, of whom not more than a dozen were killed; the others moved out of town.  It is true that I once followed the perilous trade of a soldier, but my eminence in Sole Surviving is of a later growth and not specially the product of the sword.

Opening the portfolio of memory, I draw out picture after picture—­“figure-pieces”—­groups of forms and faces whereof mine only now remains, somewhat the worse for wear.