True, this has not added much to our wealth, though it has been some
satisfaction to realize I have done my possible. My health has suffered
somewhat--I have grown absent-minded, and in the morning my head feels
strange. However, that may not be due entirely to my unnatural abstinence.
However, on Friday the fifteenth July, at three o'clock precisely, as I
sat here in meditation having finished a small work, I saw a telegraph boy
hurry toward me down the street. Then had I a premonition. My heart beat
as it has not these twenty years. In an instant I was reading the message:
my brother, who long ago ran away on adventure to Indo-China, had just
died and left me a fortune in tea.
That was on Friday the fifteenth. And do you know what has happened since?
I have lived two separate lives. Yes, two existences have unrolled before
me. In one I saw myself as I would have been without the telegram. My
business fell away; my son was born a daughter, to my wife's indignation
and my own dismay; and having sold my little shop I sought work in a
cursed factory. Ah me, it was terrible! But the other picture.
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