B.O.S.  Bos.  You have seen the three magic letters on the advertisement pages of magazines and newspapers, in the windows of provision merchants, and on calendars for next year you receive by post in the month of November.  They scatter pamphlets also, written in a sickly enthusiastic style and in several languages, giving statistics of slaughter and bloodshed enough to make a Turk turn faint.  The “art” illustrating that “literature” represents in vivid and shining colours a large and enraged black bull stamping upon a yellow snake writhing in emerald-green grass, with a cobalt-blue sky for a background.  It is atrocious and it is an allegory.  The snake symbolizes disease, weakness—­perhaps mere hunger, which last is the chronic disease of the majority of mankind.  Of course everybody knows the B. O. S. Ltd., with its unrivalled products:  Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled perfection, Tribos, whose nourishment is offered to you not only highly concentrated, but already half digested.  Such apparently is the love that Limited Company bears to its fellowmen—­even as the love of the father and mother penguin for their hungry fledglings.

Of course the capital of a country must be productively employed.  I have nothing to say against the company.  But being myself animated by feelings of affection towards my fellow-men, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising.  Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.

In various parts of the civilized and uncivilized world I have had to swallow B. O. S. with more or less benefit to myself, though without great pleasure.  Prepared with hot water and abundantly peppered to bring out the taste, this extract is not really unpalatable.  But I have never swallowed its advertisements.  Perhaps they have not gone far enough.  As far as I can remember they make no promise of everlasting youth to the users of B. O. S., nor yet have they claimed the power of raising the dead for their estimable products.  Why this austere reserve, I wonder?  But I don’t think they would have had me even on these terms.  Whatever form of mental degradation I may (being but human) be suffering from, it is not the popular form.  I am not gullible.

I have been at some pains to bring out distinctly this statement about myself in view of the story which follows.  I have checked the facts as far as possible.  I have turned up the files of French newspapers, and I have also talked with the officer who commands the military guard on the Ile Royale, when in the course of my travels I reached Cayenne.  I believe the story to be in the main true.  It is the sort of story that no man, I think, would ever invent about himself, for it is neither grandiose nor flattering, nor yet funny enough to gratify a perverted vanity.