Like her West Indian neighbors, of which beautiful isles Americans now know so little, but of which they will know much more when their flag flies over all of them, as it must within the life of the present generation, Venezuela has been treated most bountifully by nature and most brutally by man. Cursed they all may have been by the seas of innocent blood in which they were barbarously bathed during their extended infancy and their prolonged childhood, from which they have not yet emerged. It seems that all the powers of darkness have conspired to retard their growth and hold them slaves to savagery. Accustomed from the days of the Spanish _conquistadores_, and the pirates who followed them, to being plundered and persecuted in every way that the mercenary mind of man could devise, the Venezuelanos have grown so hardened to turmoil and torture that it has become second nature to them to live in an atmosphere which generates riot and robbery. Their blood is an unholy mixture of Indian, Carib, and Spanish, with other and more recent strains of all sorts. They are the most inconsequential, emotional, ungrateful, and treacherous people on the face of the earth--and yet I love them. The ambition of their leaders runs only to graft, while the underlings yearn for war as a child cries for a plaything. At the behest of some self-constituted chieftain, who has strutted in front of a mirror until he imagines himself a second Simon Bolivar, they rise in rebellion, because it gives them a chance to prey on the country, and, if their revolt is successful, to continue and extend their preying. But some day a real man will rise up among them and lead them out of their blackness and butchery into peace and prosperity, and Venezuela, with her wild wastes of wealth, will become great beyond the imaginings of her discoverers. This is not the full story of my life but it tells of some of the incidents which I have enjoyed the most. My best fight was with old Moy Sen, the pirate king, in the China Sea, and my closest call was when I was sentenced to be shot at sunrise in Santo Domingo. These events supplied the most delightful feasts of the excitement which my nature has ever craved, yet I have lived well, in that respect, all along. I have no disappointments and no regrets, except that this existence is too short. If I had my life to live over again it would be lived in the same way, though, I would hope, with a still greater share of excitement, because it was for just such a life that I was created. What the purpose of it was I neither know nor care, nor am I in the least concerned as to what my destiny next holds in store for me. I hope, however, that in some land with opportunity for wide activity, I will be reincarnated as a filibuster and a buccaneer, and that I will so continue until my identity is merged into a composite mass of kindred souls. THE END TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.