But the _indigestions_ of mind and body that were to play so large a part in his subsequent career were still only beginning. His liver and his gastric juice, his wonder and imagination kept up a fight against the things that threatened to overwhelm soul and body together. Outside the regions devastated by the school curriculum he was still intensely curious. He had cheerful phases of enterprise, and about thirteen he suddenly discovered reading and its joys. He began to read stories voraciously, and books of travel, provided they were also adventurous. He got these chiefly from the local institute, and he also "took in," irregularly but thoroughly, one of those inspiring weeklies that dull people used to call "penny dreadfuls," admirable weeklies crammed with imagination that the cheap boys' "comics" of to-day have replaced. At fourteen, when he emerged from the valley of the shadow of education, there survived something, indeed it survived still, obscured and thwarted, at five and thirty, that pointed--not with a visible and prevailing finger like the finger of that beautiful woman in the picture, but pointed nevertheless--to the idea that there was interest and happiness in the world. Deep in the being of Mr. Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion that over and above the things that are jolly and "bits of all right," there was beauty, there was delight, that somewhere--magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere, were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind. He would sneak out on moonless winter nights and stare up at the stars, and afterwards find it difficult to tell his father where he had been. He would read tales about hunters and explorers, and imagine himself riding mustangs as fleet as the wind across the prairies of Western America, or coming as a conquering and adored white man into the swarming villages of Central Africa. He shot bears with a revolver--a cigarette in the other hand--and made a necklace of their teeth and claws for the chief's beautiful young daughter. Also he killed a lion with a pointed stake, stabbing through the beast's heart as it stood over him. He thought it would be splendid to be a diver and go down into the dark green mysteries of the sea. He led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts, and died on the ramparts at the moment of victory. (His grave was watered by a nation's tears.) He rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten. He was beloved by queens in barbaric lands, and reconciled whole nations to the Christian faith. He was martyred, and took it very calmly and beautifully--but only once or twice after the Revivalist week. It did not become a habit with him. He explored the Amazon, and found, newly exposed by the fall of a great tree, a rock of gold.