He had braved the hungry ocean when the same was in commotion, he had
floated on the wreckage of his tempest-shattered bark; he had flirted
in deep waters with the merman's wives and daughters, he had scrapped
through seven sessions with a large man-eating shark.

He had roamed in regions polar, where there's no effulgence solar, he
had slain the festive walrus and the haughty arctic bear; and his
watchword had been spoken in the wastes by whites unbroken, and he
shelled out many gumdrops to the natives living there.

In the jungles, dark and fearful, where the tiger, fat and cheerful,
gnaws the bones of foreign hunters, he had gone, unscathed, his way; he
had whipped a big constrictor, and emerged the smiling victor from a
scrimmage with a hippo, which was fond of deadly fray.

He was shot with poisoned arrows and his tale of anguish harrows up the
bosom of the reader, but he lived to journey home; he was chased by
wolves in Russia, thrown in prison cell in Prussia, and was captured by
fierce bandits in the neighborhood of Rome. He had lived where dwells
the savage whose ambition is to ravage and to fill his cozy wigwam with
a handsome line of scalps; he had lived with desert races, sought the
strange and distant places, he had stood upon the summit of the
loftiest of Alps.

To his home at last returning, filled with sentimental yearning, "Now,"
he cried, "farewell to danger--I have left its stormy track!" Far from
scenes of strife and riot he desired long years of quiet, but a casting
from an airship fell three miles and broke his back.