Years passed,
bringing with them great changes for me. I left California and settled
in England. I wrote a book which excited a certain amount of interest,
and inspired some of my old school-fellows to renew acquaintance with
me. By this time I had forgotten Johnson. He was part of a distant
country, where the fine white dust settles thickly upon all things and
persons. In England, where the expected, so to speak, comes to five
o'clock tea, such surprising individuals as Johnson appear--if they
ever do appear--as creatures of a disordered fancy or digestive
apparatus. Once I told the story at the Scribblers' Club to a couple
of journalists. They winked at each other, and said politely that I
spun a good yarn, for an amateur! "I never tell a story," said the
elder of my critics, "till I've worked out a climax. You leave us at
the top of a confounded hill in California, bang up in the clouds."
And then the climax flitted into sight, masquerading as a barrel of
claret. The claret came from Bordeaux. It was Leoville Poyferre, 1899.
Not a line of explanation came with it, but all charges were prepaid.
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