There's the trouble; if one only _dared_!
I see lots of them--I'll be frank about it--that I should
like to grab, to sling over my shoulder and carry away
with me; or, what is the same thing, allowing for modern
conditions, have an express man carry them. I notice them
at Atlantic City, I see them in Fifth Avenue--yes,
everywhere. But would they come? That's the _deuce_ of
it. Would they come right along, like the cave-woman,
merely biting off my ear as they came, or are they
degenerate enough to bring an action against me, indicting
the express company as a party of the second part?
Doubts such as these prevent me from taking active
measures. But they leave me, as they leave many another
man, preoccupied and fascinated with the cave-man.
One may imagine, then, my extraordinary interest in him
when I actually met him in the flesh. Yet the thing came
about quite simply, indeed more by accident than by
design, an adventure open to all.
It so happened that I spent my vacation in Kentucky--the
region, as everybody knows, of the great caves. They
extend--it is a matter of common knowledge--for hundreds
of miles; in some places dark and sunless tunnels, the
black silence broken only by the dripping of the water
from the roof; in other places great vaults like
subterranean temples, with vast stone arches sweeping to
the dome, and with deep, still water of unfathomed depth
as the floor; and here and there again they are lighted
from above through rifts in the surface of the earth,
and are dry and sand strewn--fit for human habitation.
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