They was all good, an' they went to their reward too
soon in life for me, who even in them days regarded death as a stuffy an'
unpleasant diversion. Learnin' at an early period that virtue was its only
reward, an' a-wish-in' others, I says to myself: 'Jim,' says I, 'if you
wishes to become a magnet in this village, be sinful. If so be as you are
a good boy, an' kind to your sister an' all other animals, you'll end up
as a prosperous father with fifteen hundred a year sure, with never no
hope for no public preferment beyond bein' made the superintendent of the
Sunday-school; but if so be as how you're bad, you may become famous, an'
go to Congress, an' have your picture in the Sunday noospapers.' So I
looks around for books tellin' how to get 'Famous in Fifty Ways,' an'
after due reflection I settles in my mind that to be a pirate's just the
thing for me, seein' as how it's both profitable an' healthy. Passin' over
details, let me tell you that I became a pirate. I ran away to sea, an' by
dint of perseverance, as the Sunday-school books useter say, in my badness
I soon became the centre of a evil lot; an' when I says to 'em, 'Boys, I
wants to be a pirate chief,' they hollers back, loud like, 'Jim, we're
with you,' an' they was. For years I was the terror of the Venezuelan
Gulf, the Spanish Main, an' the Pacific seas, but there was precious
little money into it.
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