文档介绍：CHAPTER I
I MEET SIR HENRY CURTIS
IT is a curious thing that at my age - fifty-five last birthday - I should find myself taking up a pen to try and write a history. I wonder what sort of a history it will be when I have done it, if I e to the end of the trip! I have done a good many things in my life, which seems a long one to me, owing to my having begun so young, perhaps. At an age when other boys are at school I was earning my living as a trader in the old Colony. I have been trading, hunting, fighting, or mining ever since. And yet it is only eight months ago that I made my pile. It is a big pile now I have got it - I don't yet know how big - but I don't think I would go through the last fifteen or sixteen months again for it; no, not if I knew that I e out safe at the end, pile and all. But then, I am a timid man, and don't like violence, and am pretty sick of adventure. I wonder why I am going to write this book; it is not in my line. I am not a literary man, though very devoted to the Old Testament and also to the "Ingoldsby Legends." Let me try and set down my reasons, just to see if I have any.
First reason: Because Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good asked me to.
Second reason: Because I am laid up here at Durban with the pain and trouble in my left leg. Ever since that confounded lion got hold of me I have been liable to it, and its being rather bad just now makes me limp more than ever. There must be some poison in a lion's teeth, otherwise how is it that when your wounds are healed they break out again, generally, mark you, at the same time of year that you got your mauling? It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of o. It breaks the routine of the thing, and, putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't like that. This is by the way.
Third reason: Because I want my boy Harry, who is over there at the hospital in Lon