Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
a few, mostly Anglo-Saxon, skilled in the art of, as the saying is, "taking a rise" out of his kind host.
With a rapid, jingling drive to the harbor in a two-wheeled machine (which Captain Mitchell called a curricle) behind a fleet and scraggy mule beaten all the time by an obviously Neapolitan driver, the cycle would be nearly closed before the lighted-up offices of the O.S.N. Company, remaining open so late because of the steamer. Nearly—but not quite.
"Ten o'clock. Your ship won't be ready to leave till half-past twelve, if by then. Come in for a brandy-and-soda and one more cigar."
And in the superintendent's private room the privileged passenger by the Ceres or Juno or Pallas, stunned and as it were annihilated mentally by a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated information imperfectly apprehended, would listen like a tired child to a fairy tale; would hear a voice, familiar and surprising in its pompousness, tell him, as if from another world, how there was "in this very harbor" an international naval demonstration which put an end to the Costaguana-Sulaco War. How the United States cruiser Powhatan was the first to salute the Occidental flag white,—with a wreath of green laurel in the middle encircling a yellow amarilla flower. Would hear how General Montero, in less than a month after proclaiming himself Emperor of Costaguana, was shot dead (during a solemn and public distribution of orders and crosses) by a young artillery officer, the brother of his then mistress.
"The abominable Pedrito, sir, fled the country," the voice would say. And it would continue: "A cap-
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