Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

teen, a matter of prime importance as to its main statement;but in its form it is calculated to excite a certain amount ofwonder and attention. In course of time the boy, at first onlypuzzled by the angry jeremiads, but rather sorry for his dad,began to turn the matter over in his mind in such momentsas he could spare from play and study. In about a year hehad evolved from the lecture of the letters a definite convictionthat there was a silver mine in the Sulaco province ofthe Republic of Costaguana, where poor Uncle Harry hadbeen shot by soldiers a great many years before. There wasalso connected closely with that mine a thing called the ‘iniquitousGould Concession,’ apparently written on a paperwhich his father desired ardently to ‘tear and fling into thefaces’ of presidents, members of judicature, and ministers ofState. And this desire persisted, though the names of thesepeople, he noticed, seldom remained the same for a wholeyear together. This desire (since the thing was iniquitous)seemed quite natural to the boy, though why the affair wasiniquitous he did not know. Afterwards, with advancingwisdom, he managed to clear the plain truth of the businessfrom the fantastic intrusions of the Old Man of the Sea,vampires, and ghouls, which had lent to his father’s correspondencethe flavour of a gruesome Arabian Nights tale. Inthe end, the growing youth attained to as close an intimacywith the San Tome mine as the old man who wrote theseplaintive and enraged letters on the other side of the sea.He had been made several times already to pay heavy finesfor neglecting to work the mine, he reported, besides othersums extracted from him on account of future royalties, on