A Thousand Deaths

I had been in the water about an hour, and cold, exhausted, with a
terrible cramp in my right calf, it seemed as though my hour had come.
Fruitlessly struggling against the strong ebb tide, I had beheld the
maddening procession of the water-front lights slip by, but now I gave
up attempting to breast the stream and contented myself with the bitter
thoughts of a wasted career, now drawing to a close.

It had been my luck to come of good, English stock, but of parents whose
account with the bankers far exceeded their knowledge of child-nature
and the rearing of children. While born with a silver spoon in my mouth,
the blessed atmosphere of the home circle was to me unknown. My father,
a very learned man and a celebrated antiquarian, gave no thought to his
family, being constantly lost in the abstractions of his study; while my
mother, noted far more for her good looks than her good sense, sated
herself with the adulation of the society in which she was perpetually
plunged. I went through the regular school and college routine of a boy
of the English bourgeoisie, and as the years brought me increasing
strength and passions, my parents suddenly became aware that I was
possessed of an immortal soul, and endeavoured to draw the curb. But it
was too late; I perpetrated the wildest and most audacious folly, and
was disowned by my people, ostracised by the society I had so long
outraged, and with the thousand pounds my father gave me, with the
declaration that he would neither see me again nor give me more, I took
a first-class passage to Australia.

Since then my life had been one long peregrination--from the Orient to
the Occident, from the Arctic to the Antarctic--to find myself at last,
an able seaman at thirty, in the full vigour of my manhood, drowning in
San Francisco Bay because of a disastrously successful attempt to desert
my ship.