Mr. Case did not laugh at me.  He came back and stood on the string-piece where it crossed the opening, telling me to put my hand on his shoulder.  But I did not want to do that.  I wanted to cross alone—­when I got ready.  It took me perhaps two minutes to get ready.  Then I stepped over.  It was, of course, absurdly easy.  I had known it would be.  But as we walked along I kept thinking to myself:  “I shall have to cross that beastly place again when we come back,” and I marveled the more at the amazing steadiness of eye and mind and nerve that enables some men to go continually prancing about over emptiness infinitely more engulfing than that which had troubled and was troubling me.

Returning I stepped across without physical hesitation.  But after I had crossed I continued to hate that gap.  I hated it as I drove back to the hotel, that afternoon, as I ate dinner that night, as I went to bed, and in my dreams I continued to cross it, and to see the river waiting for me, seeming to look up and leer and beckon.  I woke up hating the gap in the bridge as much as ever; I hated it down into the State of Mississippi, and over into Georgia; and wherever I have gone since, I have continued to hate it.  Of course there isn’t any gap there now.  It was covered long ago.  Yet for me it still exists, like some obnoxious person who, though actually dead, lives on in the minds of those who knew him.

FARTHEST SOUTH

CHAPTER LI

BEAUTIFUL SAVANNAH

How often it occurs that the great work a man set out originally to accomplish, is lost sight of, by future generations, in contemplation of other achievements of that man, which he himself regarded as of secondary importance.

In 1733, the year in which General Oglethorpe started his Georgia colony, there were more than a hundred offenses for which a person might be hanged in England; Oglethorpe’s primary idea in founding the colony was to provide a means of freeing debtors from prison, and giving them a fresh start in life; yet it is as the man responsible for the laying out of the beautiful city of Savannah, that Oglethorpe is probably most widely remembered to-day.

Oglethorpe was a first-rate soldier.  He defeated a superior Spanish force from Florida, and successfully resisted attacks from the Indians.  Also, he was a man whose ethical sense was in advance of his period.  He did not permit slavery in Georgia, and it was not adopted there until he went back to England.  In planning Savannah he was assisted by a Charleston engineer named Bull, for whom the chief street of Savannah is named.  The place is laid out very simply; it has rectangular blocks and wide roads, with small parks, or squares, at regular intervals.  There are some two dozen of these small parks, aside from one or two larger parks, a parade ground, and numerous