Finding no Guiteau or Troppmann here, I let the pages slide under my fingers and stopped at this:
"My own pseudo-conclusion:
That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathemized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences."
With some astonishment, I continued to dip into the book, sounding it here and there, but did not bring up even so well-damned a sample of the bottom as Benedict Arnold. Instead I got these:
"An object from which nets were suspended—
Deflated balloon with its network hanging from it—
A super-dragnet?
That something was trawling overhead?
The birds of Baton Rouge.
I think that we're fished for. It may be we're highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere."
. . . "Melanicus.
That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip—a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful."
. . . "British India Company's steamer Patna, while on a
