A 721,039 1. ↑ YOM tudi ta TIME A P 1 C $ ***539* {@%\_D>»^»« 2. University of Michigan Libraries 1817 ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS Storage PS 1319 'AI А 1893 Transfer to Storage 5-16-84 ů + The THIN THR JUMPING ROG TH T رد. 11 W/W EVEN VEN a criminal is entitled to fair play; and cer- tainly when a man who has done no harm has been unjustly treated, he is privileged to do his best to right himself. My attention has just been called to an article some three years old in a French Maga- zine entitled, "Revue des Deux Mondes" (Review of Some Two Worlds), wherein the writer treats of "Les Humoristes Americaines" (These Humorists Amer- THE ORIGINAL STORY IN ENGLISH. THE RE-TRANS- LATION, CLAWED BACK FROM THE FRENCH, IN- TO A A CIVILIZED LAN- GUAGE ONCE MORE, BY PATIENT AND UN- REMUNERATE D TOIL. ! 12 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES icans). I am one of these humorists Americans dissected by him, and hence the complaint I am making. This gentleman's article is an able one (as articles go, in the French, where they always tangle up every- thing to that degree that when you start into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or not). It is a very good article, and the writer says all manner of kind and complimentary things about me-for which I am sure I thank him with all my heart; but then why should he go and spoil all his praise by one unlucky experiment? What I refer to is this: he says my Jumping Frog is a funny story, but still he can't see why it should ever really convulse anyone with laughter-and straight- way proceeds to translate it into French in order to prove to his nation that there is nothing so very extravagantly funny about it. Just there is where my complaint originates. He has not translated it at all; he has simply mixed it all up; it is no more like the Jumping Frog when he gets through with it than I am like a meridian of longitude. In order that even the unlettered may know my injury and give me their compassion, I have been at infinite pains and trouble to re-translate this French version back into English; and to tell the truth I have well nigh worn myself out at it, having scarcely rested from my work during five days and nights. I cannot speak the French language, but I can translate very well, } THE JUMPING FROG 13 though not fast, I being self-educated. I ask the reader to run his eye over the original English ver- sion ofthe Jumping Frog, and then read my re-trans- lation from the French, and kindly take notice how the Frenchman has riddled the grammar. I think it is the worst I ever saw; and yet the French are called a polished nation. If I had a boy that put sentences together as they do, I would polish him to some pur- pose. Without further introduction, the Jumping Frog, as I originally wrote it, was as follows-[after it will be found my re-translation from the French]: THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS* COUNTY. In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only con- jectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it succeeded. I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tran- quil countenance. He roused up, and gave me good-day. I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley-Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, a young minister of the Gospel, * Pronounced Cal-e-va-ras. 14 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel's Camp. I added that if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him. Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair, and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned his initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasın; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once. "Rev. Leonidas W. H'ın, Reverend Le-well, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49—or may be it was the spring of '50-I don't recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume warn't finished when he first came to the camp; but any way, he was the curiosest man about always bet- ting on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get any- body to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit him-any way just so's he got a bet, he was satisfied. But still he was lucky, uncom- mon lucky; he most always come out winner. He was always ready and laying for a chance; there couldn't be no solit'ry thing mentioned but that feller'd offer to bet on it, and take ary side you please, as I was just telling you. If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush or you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would THE JUMPING FROG 15 * fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was too, and a good man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to-to wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but JET # ✓ • Ta K Photo. Eng. Co.NXI A + A wiggle at the date the a ZA what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley and can tell you about him. Why, it never made no difference to him-he'd bet on any thing-the dangest feller. Parson Walker's wife laid very sick once, for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn't going to save her; but one morning he come in, and Smiley 16 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES up and asked him how she was, and he said she was considable better-thank the Lord for his inf'nit mercy-and coming on so smart that with the blessing of Prov'dence she'd get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought, says, "Well, I'll risk two-and-a-half she don't anyway." Thish-yer Smiley had a mare-the boys called her the fifteen- minute nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster than that-and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the dis- temper, or the consumption, or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag-end of the race she'd get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and some- times out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose-and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down. And he had a little small bull-pup, that to look at him you'd think he warn't worth a cent but to set around and look ornery and lay for a chance to steal something. But as soon as money was up on him he was a different dog; his under-jaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'-castle of a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover and shine like the furnaces. And a dog might tackle him and bully-rag him, and bite him, and throw him over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew Jackson-which was the name of the pup-Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was sat- isfied, and hadn't expected nothing else-and the bets being doubled and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up; and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j'int of his hind leg and freeze to it-notchaw, you understand, but only just grip and hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year. Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till he * THE JUMPING FROG 17 harnessed a dog once that didn't have no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off in a circular saw, and when the thing had gone along far enough, and the money was all up, and he come to make a snatch for his pet holt, he see in a minute how he'd been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he 'peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and didn't try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad. He gave Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn't no hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died. It was a good pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him and he had genius-I know it, because he hadn't no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances if he hadn't no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out. Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tom-cats and all of them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you conldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal❜lated to educate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut-see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do 'most anything—and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this floor-Dan'l Webster was 2 18 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES the name of the frog-and sing out, "Flies, Dan'l, flies!" and quicker'n you could wink he'd spring straight up and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the floor ag'in as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightfor❜ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you under- stand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had traveled and been everywheres, all said he laid over any frog that ever they see. Well, Smiley kep' the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him down town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller —a stranger in the camp, he was-come acrost him with his box, and says: "What might it be that you've got in the box?" And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, "It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, maybe, but it ain't—it's only just a frog." And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and says, "H'm-so 'tis. Well, what's he good for?" "Well," Smiley, says, easy and careless, "he's good enough for one thing, I should judge-he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county." The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, "Well," he says, "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog." "Maybe you don't," Smiley says. "Maybe you understand frogs and maybe you don't understand 'em; maybe you've had experience, { THE JUMPING FROG 19 and maybe you ain't only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my opinion and I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county." And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, “Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you." And then Smiley says, "That's all right-that's all right—if you'll hold my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog." And so the feller took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set down to wait. So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot-filled him pretty near up to his chin-and set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, and says: "Now, if you're ready, set him along side of Dan'l, with his fore- paws just even with Dan'l's, and I'll give the word." Then he says, "One-two-three-git!" and him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind, and the new frog hopped off lively, but Dan'l give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders-so-like a Frenchman, but it warn't no use-he couldn't budge; he was planted as solid as a church, and he couldn't no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was, of course. The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder -so-at Dan'l, and says again, very deliberate, "Well," he says, "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog." Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long time, and at last he says, "I do wonder what in the nation 20 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. that frog throwed off for-I wonder if there ain't something the matter with him-he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow." And he ketched Dan'l by the nap of the neck, and hefted him, and says, "Why blame my cats if he don't weight five pounds!" and turned him upside down and he belched out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man waran manda to ~~ ~ Ę *** *** *** *** → min » ve Su ** ** ** Photo. Ed. Co. NY. . WHEN OF "THEASTERN AND SEE HOW Vimo dun mu + NOT A ww -he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketched him. And-__"} [Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was wanted.] And turning to me as he moved away, he said: "Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy-I ain't going to be gone a second." THE JUMPING FROG 21 But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started away. At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he button- holed me and re-commenced: "Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no tail, only jest a short stump like a bannanner, and- However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about the afflicted cow, but took my leave. "" [Translation of the above back from the French]. THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS. It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim Smiley: it was in the winter of '49, possibly well at the spring of '50, I no me recollect not exactly. This which me makes to believe that it was the one or the other, it is that I shall remember that the grand flume is not achieved when he arrives at the camp for the first time, but of all sides he was the man the most fond of to bet which one have seen, betting upon all that which is presented, when he could find an adversary; and when he not of it could not, he passed to the side opposed. All that which convenienced to the the other, to him convenienced also; seeing that he had a bet, Smiley was satisfied. And he had a chance! a chance even worth- less nearly always he gained. It must to say that he was always near to himself expose, but one no could mention the least thing without that this gaillard offered to bet the bottom, no matter what, and to take the side that one him would, as I you it said all at the hour (tout a l'heure). If it there was of races, you him find rich or ruined at the end; if it there is a combat of dogs, he bring his bet; he himself laid always for a combat of cats, for a combat of cocks;-by-blue! if you have see two birds upon a fence, he you should have offered of to bet which of those birds shall fly the first; 22 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES and if there is meeting at the camp (meeting au camp) he comes to bet regularly for the cure Walker, which he judged to be the best predicator of the neighborhood (predicateur des environs) and which he was in effect, and a brave man. He would encounter a bug of wood in the road, whom he will bet upon the time which he shall take to go where she would go-and if you him have take at the word, he will follow the bug as far as Mexique, without him- self caring to go so far; neither of the time which he there lost. One time the woman of the cure Walker is very sick during long time, it seemed that one not her saved not; but one morning the cure arrives, and Smiley him demanded how she goes, and he said that she is well better, grace to the infinite misery (lui demande comment elle va, et il dit qu'elle est bien mieux, grace a l'infinie misericorde) so much better that with the benediction of the Prov- idence she herself of it would pull out (elle s'en tirerait); and behold without there thinking Smiley responds: "Well, I gage two-and- half that she will die all of same." This Smiley had an animal which the boys called the nag of the quarter of hour, but solely for pleasantry, you comprehend, because, well understand, she was more fast as that! [Now why that excla- mation?-M. T.] And it was custom of to gain of the silver with this beast, notwithstanding she was poussive, cornarde, always taken of asthma, of colics or of consumption, or something of approaching. One him would give two or three hundred yards at the departure, then one him passed without pain; but never at the last she not fail of herself echauffer, of herself exasperate, and she arrives herself ecartant, se defendant, her legs greles in the air before the obstacles, sometimes them elevating and making with this more of dust than any horse, more of noise above with his eternumens and reniflemens-crac! she arrives then always first by one head, as just as one can it measure. And he had a small bull dog (boule dogue!) who, to him see, no value, not a cent; one would believe that to bet against him it was to steal, so much he i THE JUMPING FROG 23 was ordinary; but as soon as the game made, she becomes another dog. Her jaw inferior commence to project like a deck of before, his teeth themselves discover brilliant like some furnaces, and a dog could him tackle (le taquiner), him excite, him murder (le mordre), him throw two or three times over his shoulder, Andre Jackson-this was the name of the dog-Andre Jackson takes that tranquilly, as if he not himself was never expecting other thing, and when the bets were doubled and redoubled against him, he you seize the other dog just at the articulation of the leg of behind, and he not it leave more, not that he it masti- cate, you conceive, but he himself there shall be holding during until that one throws the sponge in the air, must he wait a year. Smiley gained always with this beast-la; unhappily they have finished by elevating a dog who no had not of feet of behind, because one them had sawed; and when things were at the point that he would, and that he came to himself throw upon his morsel favorite, the poor dog comprehended in an instant that he himself was deceived in him, and that the other dog him had. You no have never see person having the air more penaud and more dis- couraged; he not made no effort to gain the combat, and was rudely shucked. Eh bien! this Smiley nourished some terriers a rats, and some cocks of combat, and some cats, and all sorts of things; and with his rage of betting one no had more of repose. He trapped one day a frog and him imported with him (et l'emporta chez lui) saying that he pretended to make his education. You me believe if you will, but during three months he not has nothing done but to him apprehend to jump (apprendre a sauter) in a court retired of her mansion (de sa maison). And I you respond that he have suc- ceeded. He him gives a small blow by behind, and the instant after you shall see the frog turn in the air like a grease-biscuit, make one summersault, sometimes two, when she was well started, and re-fall upon his feet like a cat. He him had accomplished in the 24 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES art of to gobble the flies (gober des mouches), and him there exercised continually-so well that a fly at the most far that she appeared was a fly lost. Smiley had custom to say that all which lacked to a frog it was the education, but with the education she could do nearly all—and I him believe. Tenez, I him have seen pose Daniel Webster there upon this plank-Daniel Webster was the name of the frog-and to him sing, "Some flies, Daniel, some flies!"-in the flash of the eye Daniel had bounded and seized a fly here upon the counter, then jumped anew at the earth, where he rested truly to himself scratch the head with his behind-foot, as if he no had not the least idea of his superiority. Never you not have seen frog as modest, as natural, sweet as she was. And when he himself agitated to jump purely and simply upon plain earth, she does more ground in one jump than any beast of his species than you can know. To jump plain-this was his strong. When he himself agitated for that, Smiley multiplied the bets upon her as long as there to him remained a red. It must to know, Smiley was monstrously proud of his frog, and he of it was right, for some men who were traveled, who had all seen, said that they to him would be injurious to him compare to another frog. Smiley guarded Daniel in a little box latticed which he carried by times to the vil- age for some bet. One day an individual stranger at the camp him arrested with his box and him said: "What is this that you have then shut up there within?" Smiley said, with an air indifferent: "That could be a paroquet, or a syringe (ou un serin), but this no is nothing of such, it not is but a frog." The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side and from the other, then he said: "Tiens! in effect!-At what is she good?" "My God!" respond Smiley, always with an air disengaged, "she is good for one thing, to my notice, (a mon avis), she can batter THE JUMPING FROG 25 in jumping (elle peut batter en sautant) all frogs of the county of Calaveras." The individual re-took the box, it examined of new longly, and it rendered to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate : "Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog." (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune grenouille). [If that isn't grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no judge.-M. T.] "Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley, "possible that you-you comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there com- prehend nothing; possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but an amateur. Of all manner, (De toute maniere) I better forty dollars that she batter in jumping no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras.” The individual reflected a second, and said like sad: "I not am but a stranger here, I no have not a frog; but if I of it had one, I would embrace the bet.” “Strong well!” respond Smiley; "nothing of more facility. If you will hold my box a minute, I go you to search a frog (j'irari vous chercher)." Behold, then, the individual, who guards the box, who puts his forty dollars upon those of Smiley, and who attends, (et qui attend). He attended enough longtimes, reflecting all solely. And figure you that he takes Daniel, him opens the mouth by force and with a tea-spoon him fills with shot of the hunt, even him fills just to the chin, then he him puts by the earth. Smiley during these times was at slopping in a swamp. Finally he trapped (attrape) a frog, him carried to that individual, and said: "Now if you be ready, put him all against Daniel, with their before-feet upon the same line, and I give the signal”—then he added: "One, two, three,-advance!" Him and the individual touched their frogs by behind, and the frog new put to jump smartly, but Daniel himself lifted ponderously, B 26 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES exalted the shoulders thus. like a Frenchman-to what good? he not could budge, he is planted solid like a church, he not advance no more than if one him had put at the anchor. Smiley was surprised and disgusted, but he not himself doubted not of the turn being intended (mais il ne se doutait pas du tour, bien entendu). The individual empocketed the silver, himself with it went, and of it himself in going is it that he no gives not a jerk of thumb over the shoulder-like that-at the poor Daniel, in say- ing with his air deliberate—(L'individu empoche l'argent, s'en va et en s'en allant est ce qu'il ne donne pas un coup de pouce par- dessus l'epaule, comme ca, au pauvre Daniel, endisant de son air delibere): "Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another." Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel, until that which at last he said: "I me demand how the devil it makes itself that this beast has refused. Is it that she had something? One would believe that she is stuffed." He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said: "The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds." He him reversed and the unhappy belched two handfuls of shot (et le malhereus, etc).—When Smiley recognized how it was, he was like mad. He deposited his frog by the earth and ran after that individual, but he not him caught never. Such is the Jumping Frog, to the distorted French eye. I claim that I never put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium tremens in my life. And what has a poor foreigner like me done, to be abused and misrepresented like this? When I say, "Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog," is it kind, is it just, for THE JUMPING FROG 27 1 1 ¡ i ļ this Frenchman to try to make it appear that I said: "Eh bien! I no saw that that frog had nothing of better than each frog?" I have no heart to write more. I never felt so about anything before. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Journalism In Tennessee. The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a correspondent who posted him as a Radical:-"While he was writing the first word, the middle, dotting his i's, crossing his t's, and punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood."- Exchange. I WAS told by the physician that a Southern cli- mate would improve my health, and so I went down to Tennessee, and got a berth on the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate editor. When I went on duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair with his feet on a pine table. There was another pine table in the room and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers and scraps and sheets of manuscript. There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled with cigar stubs and "old soldiers, and a stove with a door hanging by its upper hinge The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a "" } 1 28 JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE 29 checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down. Date of costume about 1848. He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was con- cocting a particularly knotty editorial. He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the "Spirit of the Tennessee Press," con- densing into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest. I wrote as follows:- "SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSE PRESS. "The editors of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake evidently labor under a misapprehension with regard to the Ballyhack railroad. It is not the object of the company to leave Buzzardville off to one side. On the contrary, they consider it one of the most important points along the line, and consequently can have no desire to slight it. The gentlemen of the Earthquake will, of course, take pleasure in making the correction. "John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, arrived in the city yes- terday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House. "We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs Morning Howl has fallen into the error of supposing that the election of Van Werter is not an established fact, but he will have discovered his mistake before this reminder reaches him, no doubt. He was i doubtless misled by incomplete election returns. "It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is endeavoring to contract with some New York gentlemen to pave its well-nigh impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement. The Daily Hurrah urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate success." "" 30 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance, alteration, or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang up and said- "Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such gruel as that? Give me the pen I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plough through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and marred the symmetry of my ear. "Ah," said he, "that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano-he was due yesterday." And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired. Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith's aim, who was just taking a second chance, and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off. Then the chief editor went on with his erasures and interlineations. Just as he finished them a hand- grenade came down the stove pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. How- ever, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out. JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE 31 ¡ "That stove is utterly ruined," said the chief editor. I said I believed it was. "Well, no matter-don't want it this kind of weather. I know the man that did it. I'll get him. Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.” I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn't have known it if it had had one. It now read as follows:— "SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS. "The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evi- dently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own fulsome brains-or rather in the settlings which they regard as brains. They had better swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve. "That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren. "We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Spring Morning Howl is giving out, with its usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and yet this black-hearted scoundrel degrades his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity. "Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement-it wants a jail and poorhouse more. The idea of a pavement in a one horse town composed of two gin mills, a blacksmith's shop, and that mustard- 32 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is braying about this business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense." "Now that is the way to write peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan- tods." About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved out of range-I began to feel in the way. The chief said, "That was the Colonel, likely. I've been expecting him for two days. He will be up, now, right away." He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward with a dragoon revolver in his hand. He said, "Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this mangy sheet?" "You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is gone. I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Col. Blatherskite Tecumseh?" "Right, sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are at leisure we will begin." "I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual Development in America' to finish, but there is no hurry. Begin.' Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the "" ! JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE 33 same instant. The chief lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel's bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel's left shoulder was clipped a little. They fired again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped. I then said, I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter, and I had a delicacy about participating in it further. But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat, and assured me that I was not in the way. They then talked about the elections and the crops while they reloaded, and I fell to tying up my wounds. But presently they opened fire again with animation, and every shot took effect-but it is proper to remark that five out of the six fell to my share. The sixth one mortally wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine humor, that he would have to say good morning now, as he had business up town. He then inquired the way to the undertaker's and left. The chief turned to me and said, "I am expecting company to dinner, and shall have to get ready. It will be a favor to me if you will read proof and attend to the customers.” I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was too bewildered by the fusilade that was still ringing in my ears to think of anything to say. å 34 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES He continued, "Jones will be here at 3-cowhide him. Gillespie will call earlier, perhaps-throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be along about 4- kill him. That is all for to-day, I believe. If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police-give the Chief Inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in the drawer -ammunition there in the corner-lint and bandages up there in the pigeon-holes. In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon, down-stairs. He advertises we take it out in trade." He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I had been through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were gone from me. Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window. Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took the job off my hands. In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the cor- ner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, black- legs, politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends. Then ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or Qata A JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE 35 A --8 steel one either, could describe. People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up, thrown out of the window. There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy, with a confused and frantic war-dance glimmering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes there was silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around us. He said, "You'll like this place when you get used to it.' "" I said, "I'll have to get you to excuse me; I think maybe I might write to suit you after a while; as soon as I had had some practice and learned the language I am confident I could. But, to speak the plain truth, that sort of energy of expression has its incon- veniences, and a man is liable to interruptions. You see that yourself. Vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the public, no doubt, but, then I do not like to attract so much attention as it calls forth. I can't write with comfort when I am interrupted so much as I have been to-day. I like this berth well enough, but I don't like to be left here to wait on the customers. The experiences are novel, I grant you, and entertain- ing too, after a fashion, but they are not judiciously distributed. A gentleman shoots at you through the window and cripples me; a bomb-shell comes down the stove-pipe for your gratification and sends the stove-door down my throat; a friend drops in to 36 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES swap compliments with you, and freckles me with bullet-holes till my skin won't hold my principles; you go to dinner, and Jones comes with his cowhide, Gillespie throws me out of the window, Thompson tears all my clothes off, and an entire stranger takes my scalp with the easy freedom of an old acquaintance; and in less than five minutes all the blackguards in the country arrive in their war-paint, and proceed to scare the rest of me to death with their tomahawks. Take it altogether, I never had such a spirited time in all my life as I have had to-day. No; I like you, and I like your calm unruffled way of explaining things to the customers, but you see I am not used to it. The Southern heart is too impulsive; Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger. The paragraphs which I have written to-day, and into whose cold sentences your masterly hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennessean journalism, will wake up another nest of hornets. All that mob of editors will come and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for breakfast. I shall have to bid you adieu. I decline to be present at these festivities. I came South for my health, I will go back on the same errand, and suddenly. Tennessean journalism is too stirring for me.” After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the hospital. ! STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY Story Of The Bad Little Boy. ΟΝ NCE there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim-though, if you will notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James in your Sunday-school books. It was strange, but still it was true that this one was called Jim. He didn't have any sick mother either—a sick mother who was pious and had the consumption, and would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at rest but for the strong love she bore her boy, and the anxiety she felt that the world might be barsh and cold towards him when she was gone. Most bad boys in the Sunday-books are named James, and have sick mothers, who teach them to say, "Now, I lay me down," etc., and sing them to sleep with sweet, plain- tive voices, and then kiss them good-night, and kneel down by the bedside and weep. But it was different with this fellow. He was named Jim, and there wasn't anything the matter with his mother-no consump- tion, nor anything of that kind. She was rather stout than otherwise, and she was not pious; more- 7 37 38 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES over, she was not anxious on Jim's account. She said if he were to break his neck it wouldn't be much loss. She always spanked Jim to sleep, and she never kissed him good-night; on the contrary, she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him. Once this little bad boy stole the key of the pantry, halo.210 For AN ·10.1.. • Neta *16**ANIS /** and slipped in there and helped himself to some jam, and filled up the vessel with tar, so that his mother would never know the difference; but all at once a terrible feeling didn't come over him, and something didn't seem to whisper to him, "Is it right to disobey my mother? Isn't it sinful to do this? Where do STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY 39 bad little boys go who gobble up their good kind mother's jam?" and then he didn't kneel down all alone and promise never to be wicked any more, and rise up with a light, happy heart, and go and tell his mother all about it, and beg her forgiveness, and be blessed by her with tears of pride and thankfulness in her eyes. No; that is the way with all other bad boys in the books; but it happened otherwise with this Jim, strangely enough. He ate that jam, and said it was bully, in his sinful, vulgar way; and he put in the tar, and said that was bully also, and laughed, and observed "that the old woman would get up and snort" when she found it out; and when she did find it out, he denied knowing anything about it, and she whipped him severely, and he did the crying himself. Everything about this boy was curious-everything turned out differently with him from the way it does to the bad James in the books. Once he climbed up in Farmer Acorn's apple-tree to steal apples, and the limb didn't break, and he didn't fall and break his arm, and get torn by the farmer's great dog, and then languish on a sick bed for weeks, and repent and become good. Oh! no; he stole as many apples as he wanted and came down all right; and he was all ready for the dog too, and knocked him endways with a brick when he came to tear him. It was very strange-nothing like it ever happened in those mild little books with marbled backs, and with pictures in them of men with swallow-tailed coats and - 40 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES bell-crowned hats, and pantaloons that are short in the legs, and women with the waists of their dresses under their arms, and no hoops on. Nothing like it in any of the Sunday-school books. Once he stole the teacher's pen-knife, and, when he was afraid it would be found out and he would get whipped, he slipped it into George Wilson's cap-poor Widow Wilson's son, the moral boy, the good little boy of the village, who always obeyed his mother, and never told an untruth, and was fond of his lessons, and infatuated with Sunday-school. And when the knife dropped from the cap, and poor George hung his head and blushed, as if in conscious guilt, and the grieved teacher charged the theft upon him, and was just in the very act of bringing the switch down upon his trembling shoulders, a white-haired improbable justice of the peace did not suddenly appear in their midst, and strike an attitude and say, "Spare this noble boy-there stands the cowering culprit! I was passing the school-door at recess, and unseen myself, I saw the theft committed!" And then Jim didn't get whaled, and the venerable justice didn't read the tearful school a homily and take George by the hand and say such a boy deserved to be exalted, and then tell him to come and make his home with him, and sweep out the office, and make fires, and run errands, and chop wood, and study law, and help his wife to do household labors, and have all the balance of ! STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY 41 the time to play, and get forty cents a month, and be happy. No; it would have happened that way in the books, but it didn't happen that way to Jim. No meddling old clam of a justice dropped in to make trouble, and so the model boy George got thrashed, and Jim was glad of it because, you know, Jim hated moral boys. Jim said he was "down on them milk- sops." Such was the coarse language of this bad, neglected boy. But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim was the time he went boating on Sunday, and didn't get drowned, and that other time that he got caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn't get struck by lightning. Why, you might look, and look, all through the Sunday-school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never come across anything like this. Oh no; you would find that all the bad boys who go boating on Sunday invariably get drowned; and all the bad boys who get caught out in storms when they are fishing on Sunday infallibly get struck by lightning. Boats with bad boys in them always upset on Sunday, and it always storms when bad boys go fishing on the Sabbath. How this Jim ever escaped is a mystery to me. This Jim bore a charmed life—that must have been the way of it. Nothing could hurt him. He even gave the elephant in the menagerie a plug of tobacco, 42 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES and the elephant didn't knock the top of his head off with his trunk. He browsed around the cupboard after essence of peppermint, and didn't make a mis- take and drink aqua fortis He stole his father's gun and went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn't shoot three or four of his fingers off. He struck his little that they $6.00.. \II: the age grommentHANDLERENGAN JUGA MENGEN CREA MURAL Smur. sister on the temple with his fist when he was angry, and she didn't linger in pain through long summer days, and die with sweet words of forgiveness upon her lips that redoubled the anguish of his breaking heart. No; she got over it. He ran off and went to sea at last, and didn't come back and find himself sad STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY 43 1 and alone in the world, his loved ones sleeping in the quiet churchyard, and the vine-embowered home of his boyhood tumbled down and gone to decay. Ah! no; he came home as drunk as a piper, and got into the station-house the first thing. And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and ras- cality; and now he is the infernalist wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature. So you see there never was a bad James in the Sunday-school books that had such a streak of luck as this sinful Jim with the charmed life. i THIILKK ABOUT THIS ENO. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES The Story of the Good Little Boy. ΟΝ NCE there was a good little boy by the name of Jacob Blivens. He always obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and unreasonable their de- mands were; and he always learned his book, and never was late at Sabbath-school. He would not play hookey, even when his sober judgment told him it was the most profitable thing he could do. None of the other boys could ever make that boy out, he acted so strangely. He wouldn't lie, no matter how con- venient it was. He just said it was wrong to lie, and that was sufficient for him. And he was so honest that he was simply ridiculous. The curious ways that that Jacob had, surpassed everything. He wouldn't play marbles on Sunday, he wouldn't rob birds' nests, he wouldn't give hot pennies to organ-grinders' monkeys; he didn't seem to take any interest in any kind of rational amusement. So the other boys used to try to reason it out and come to an understanding of him, but they couldn't arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. As I said before, they could only figure out a sort of vague idea that he was "afflicted," and 44 STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY 45 so they took him under their protection, and never allowed any harm to come to him. This good little boy read all the Sunday-school books; they were his greatest delight. This was the whole secret of it. He believed in the good little boys they put in the Sunday-school books; he had every confidence in them. He longed to come across one of them alive, once; but he never did. They all died before his time, maybe. Whenever he read about a particularly good one he turned over quickly to the end to see what became of him, because he wanted to travel thousands of miles and gaze on him; but it wasn't any use; that good little boy always died in the last chapter, and there was a picture of the funeral, with all his relatives and the Sunday-school children standing around the grave in pantaloons that were too short, and bonnets that were too large, and everybody crying into handkerchiefs that had as much as a yard and a half of stuff in them. He was always headed off in this way. He never could see one of those good little boys on account of his always dying in the last chapter. Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday- school book. He wanted to be put in, with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie to his mother, and her weeping for joy about it; and pictures representing him standing on the doorstep giving a penny to a poor beggar-woman with six children, + 46 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES and telling her to spend it freely, but not to be extrav- agant, because extravagance is a sin; and pictures of him magnanimously refusing to tell on the bad boy who always lay in wait for him around the corner as he came from school, and welted him over the head with a lath, and then chased him home, saying, “Hi! hi!" as he proceeded. This was the ambition of young Jacob Blivens. He wished to be put in a Sunday- school book. It made him feel a little uncomfortable sometimes when he reflected that the good little boys always died. He loved to live, you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about being a Sun- day-school-book boy. He knew it was not healthy to be good. He knew it was more fatal than consump- tion to be so supernaturally good as the boys in the books were; he knew that none of them had been able to stand it long, and it pained him to think that if they put him in a book he wouldn't ever see it, or even if they did get the book out before he died it wouldn't be popular without any picture of his funeral in the back part of it. It couldn't be much of a Sunday- school book that couldn't tell about the advice he gave to the community when he was dying. So at last, of course, he had to make up his mind to do the best he could under the circumstances-to live right, and hang on as long as he could, and have his dying speech all ready when his time came. But somehow nothing ever went right with this good little boy; nothing ever turned out with him the STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY 47 way it turned out with the good little boys in the books. They always had a good time, and the bad boys had the broken legs; but in his case there was a screw loose somewhere; and it all happened just the other way. When he found Jim Blake stealing apples, and went under the tree to read to him about the bad little boy who fell out of a neighbor's apple-tree and broke his arm, Jim fell out of the tree too, but he fell on him, and broke his arm, and Jim wasn't hurt at all. Jacob couldn't understand that. There wasn't any- thing in the books like it. And once, when some bad boys pushed a blind man over in the mud, and W TEA W2:727 15332E07 SARAZ BENG # ESO FO.ENG.00.MY! Jacob ran to help him up and receive his blessing, the blind man did not give him any blessing at all, but whacked him over the head with his stick and said he would like to catch him shoving him again, and then pretending to help him up. This was not in accor- $ 48 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES dance with any of the books. Jacob looked them all over to see. One thing that Jacob wanted to do was to find a lame dog that hadn't any place to stay, and was hungry and persecuted, and bring him home and pet him and have that dog's imperishable gratitude. And at last he found one and was happy; and he brought him home and fed him, but when he was going to pet him the dog flew at him and tore all the clothes off him except those that were in front, and made a spectacle of him that was astonishing. He examined authorities, but he could not understand the matter. It was of the same breed of dogs that was in the books, but it acted very differently. Whatever this boy did he got into trouble. The very things the boys in the books got rewarded for turned out to be about the most unprofitable things he could invest in. Once, when he was on his way to Sunday-school, he saw some bad boys starting off pleasuring in a sail- boat. He was filled with consternation, because he knew from his reading that boys who went sailing on Sunday invariably got drowned. So he ran out on a raft to warn them, but a log turned with him and slid him into the river. A man got him out pretty soon, and the doctor pumped the water out of him, and gave him a fresh start with his bellows, but he caught cold and lay sick a-bed nine weeks. But the most unaccountable thing about it was that the bad STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY 49 I boys in the boat had a good time all day, and then reached home alive and well in the most surprising manner. Jacob Blivens said there was nothing like these things in the books. He was perfectly dumb- founded. When he got well he was a little discouraged, but he resolved to keep on trying anyhow. He knew that so far his experience wouldn't do to go in a book, but he hadn't yet reached the allotted term of life for good little boys, and he hoped to be able to make a record yet if he could hold on till his time was fully up. If everything else failed he had his dying speech to fall back on. He examined his authorities, and found that it was now time for him to go to sea as a cabin-boy. He called on a ship captain and made his application, and when the captain asked for his recommendations he proudly drew out a tract and pointed to the words, "To Jacob Blivens, from his affectionate teacher." But the captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and he said, "Oh, that be blowed! that wasn't any proof that he know how to wash dishes or handle a slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn't want him." This was alto- gether the most extraordinary thing that ever hap- pened to Jacob in all his life. A compliment from a teacher, on a tract, had never failed to move the : tenderest emotions of ship captains, and open the way to all offices of honor and profit in their gift—it 4 C 50 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES never had in any book that ever he had read. He could hardly believe his senses. Photo. Ent Co Mix. Jpro This boy always had a hard time of it. Nothing ever came out according to the authorities with him. At last, one day, when he was around hunting up bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot of them in the old iron foundry fixing up a little joke on fourteen or fifteen dogs, which they had tied together in long procession, and were going to ornament with empty nitro-glycerine cans made fast to their tails. Jacob's heart was touched. He sat down on one of those cans (for he never minded grease when duty was before STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY 51 him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by the collar, and turned his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones. But just at that moment Alderman McWelter full of wrath, stepped in. All the bad boys ran away, but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and began one of those stately little Sunday-school-book speeches which always commence with "Oh, sir!" in dead opposition to the fact that no boy, good or bad, ever starts a remark with "Oh, sir." But the alderman never waited to hear the rest. He took Jacob Blivens by the ear and turned him around, and hit him a whack in the rear with the flat of his hand; and in an instant that good little boy shot out through the roof and soared away towards the sun, with the fragments of those fifteen dogs stringing after him like the tail of a kite. And there wasn't a sign of that alderman or that old iron foundry left on the face of the earth; and, as for young Jacob Blivens, he never got a chance to make his last dying speech after all his trouble fixing it up, unless he made it to the birds; because, although the bulk of him came down all right in a tree-top in an adjoining county, the rest of him was apportioned around among four townships, and so they had to hold five inquests on him to find out whether he was dead or not, and how it occurred. You never saw a boy scattered so.* Thus perished the good little boy who did the best he could, but didn't come out according to the books. 52 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. Every boy who ever did as he did prospered except him. His case is truly remarkable. It will probably never be accounted for. *This glycerine catastrophe is borrowed from a floating news- paper item, whose author's name I would give if I knew it.-[M. T.] A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE. THOSE EVENING BELLS. BY THOMAS MOORE. Those evening bells! those evening bells! How many a tale their music tells Of youth, and home, and that sweet time When last I heard their soothing chime. Those joyous hours are passed away; And many a heart that then was gay, Within the tomb now darkly dwells, And hears no more those evening bells. And so 'twill be when I am gone- That tuneful peal will still ring on; } 裔 ​L " POEMS BY MOORE AND TWAIN While other bards shall walk these dells, And sing your praise, sweet evening bells. THOSE ANNUAL BILLS. BY MARK TWAIN. These annual bills! these annual bills! How many a song their discord trills Of "truck" consumed, enjoyed, forgot, Since I was skinned by last years lot! Those joyous beans are passed away; Those onions blithe. O where are they! Once loved, lost, mourned-now vexing ILLS Your shades troop back in annual bills! And so 'twill be when I'm aground- These yearly duns will still go round, While other bards, with frantic quills, Shall damn and damn these annual bills! 53 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ااا Ce FIT. NIAGARA Mke SEIT AUT N IAGARA FALLS is a most enjoyable place of resort. The hotels are excellent, and the prices not at all exorbitant. The opportunities for fishing are not surpassed in the 54 NIAGARA 55 country; in fact, they are not even equalled elsewhere. Because, in other localities, certain places in the streams are much better than others; but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere, and so there is no use in your walking five miles to fish, when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful nearer home. The advantages of this state of things have never heretofore been properly placed before the public. The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant and none of them fatiguing. When you start out to "do" the Falls you first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the priv- ilege of looking down from a precipice into the nar- rowest part of the Niagara river. A railway "cut" through a hill would be as comely if it had the angry river tumbling and foaming through its bottom. You can descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at the edge of the water. After you have done it, you will wonder why you did it; but you will then be too late. * The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids-how first one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows, and then the other, and at what point it was that her smoke- stack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break and part asunder-and how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the 56 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES incredible feat of traveling seventeen miles in six min- utes, or six miles in seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten which. But it was very extraordinary, anyhow. It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the story nine times in succession to different parties, and never miss a word or alter a sentence or a gesture. Then you drive over the Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having the railway train overhead smash- ing down on to you. Either possibility is discom- forting taken by itself, but mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness. On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime Niagara ; and a great many people have the incredible effrontery or the native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime. Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see the stately pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of country cousins, all smiling vacantly, and all disposed in studied and uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, NIAGARA 57 and all looming up in their awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of that majestic presence whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds, who was monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this hackful of small reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood relations, the other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust. There is no actual harm in making Niagara a back- ground whereon to display one's marvelous insignif- icance in a good strong light, but it requires a sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it. When you have examined the stupendous Horseshoe Fall till you are satisfied you cannot improve on it, you return to America by the new Suspension Bridge, and follow up the bank to where they exhibit the Cave of the Winds. Here I followed instructions, and divested myself of all my clothing, and put on a waterproof jacket and overalls. This costume is picturesque, but not beau- tiful. A guide, similarly dressed, led the way down a flight of winding stairs, which wound and wound, and still kept on winding long after the thing ceased to be a novelty, and then terminated long before it had begun to be a pleasure. We were then well down under i 58 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES the precipice, but still considerably above the level of the river. We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our persons shielded from destruc- tion by a crazy wooden railing, to which I clung with both hands-not be- cause I was afraid, but because I wanted to. Presently the descent became steep- er, and the bridge flimsier, and sprays from the American Fall began to rain down on us in fast- increasing sheets that soon became blinding, and after that our progress was mostly in the nature of grop- ing. Now a furious wind began to rush t NIAGARA 59 out from behind the waterfall, which seemed deter- mined to sweep us from the bridge, and scatter us on the rocks and among the torrents below. I remarked that I wanted to go home; but it was too late. We were almost under the monstrous wall of water thundering down from above, and speech was in vain in the midst of such a pitiless crash of sound. In another moment the guide disappeared behind the deluge, and bewildered by the thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by the arrowy tempest of rain, I followed. All was darkness. Such a mad storming, roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed my ears before. I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my back. The world seemed going to destruction. I could not see anything, the flood poured down so savagely. I raised my head, with open mouth, and the most of the American cataract went down my throat. If I had sprung a leak now, I had been lost. And at this moment I discovered that the bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a foothold to the slip- pery and precipitous rocks. I never was so scared before and survived it. But we got through at last, and emerged into the open day, where we could stand in front of the laced and frothy and seething world of descending water, and look at it. When I saw how much of it there was, and how fearfully in earnest it was, I was sorry I had gone behind it. + 60 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES /*. The noble Red Man has always been a friend and darling of mine. I love to read about him in tales. and legends and romances. I love to read of his inspired sagacity, and his love of the wild free life of mountain and forest, and his general nobility of char- acter, and his stately metaphorical manner of speech, and his chivalrous love for the dusky maiden, and the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements. Especially the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements. When I found the shops at Niagara Falls full of dainty Indian bead-work, and stunning moccasins, and equally stunning toy figures repre- senting human beings who carried their weapons in holes bored through their arms and bodies, and had feet shaped like a pie, I was filled with emotion. I knew that now, at last, I was going to come face to face with the noble Red Man. A lady clerk in a shop told me, indeed, that all her grand array of curiosities were made by the Indians, and that they were plenty about the Falls, and that they were friendly, and it would not be dangerous to speak to them. And sure enough, as I approached the bridge leading over to Luna Island, I came upon a noble Son of the Forest sitting under a tree, dili- gently at work on a bead reticule. He wore a slouch hat and brogans, and had a short black pipe in his mouth. Thus does the baneful contact with our effiminate civilization dilute the picturesque pomp which is so natural to the Indian when far removed NIAGARA 61 from us in his native haunts. I addressed the relic as follows: "Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a- Whack happy? Does the great Speckled Thunder sigh for the war path, or is his heart contented with dream- ing of the dusky maiden, the Pride of the Forest? Does the mighty Sachem yearn to drink the blood of his enemies, or is he satisfied to make bead reticules for the pappooses of the paleface? Speak, sublime relic of bygone grandeur-venerable ruin, speak!" The relic said- "An' it is mesilf, Dennis Hooligan, that ye'd be takin' for a dirty Injin, ye drawlin', lantern-jawed, spider-legged divil! By the piper that played before Moses, I'll ate ye!" I went away from there. By and by, in the neighborhood of the Terrapin Tower, I came upon a gentle daughter of the aborigines in fringed and beaded buckskin moccasins and leggins, seated on a bench, with her pretty wares about her. She had just carved out a wooden chief that had a strong family resemblance to a clothes-pin, and was now boring a hole through his abdomen to put his bow through. I hesitated a moment, and then addressed her: "Is the heart of the forest maiden heavy? Is the Laughing Tadpole lonely? Does she mourn over the extinguished council-fires of her race, and the van- ished glory of her ancestors? Or does her sad spirit 62 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES wander afar toward the hunting grounds whither her brave Gobbler-of-the-Lightnings is gone? Why is my daughter silent? Has she aught against the paleface stranger?" The maiden said- "Faix, an' is it Biddy Malone ye dare to be callin' names? Lave this, or I'll shy your lean carcass over the cataract, ye sniveling blaggard!" Siv 7/16 ۳۶ My ina Y Liko. ミスト ​!!!!)) Mily ;))))); thì Wir Williams ་ཁ་ Photo Eng. Co. MRZZ I adjourned from there also. "Confound these Indians!" I said. "They told me they were tame; but, if appearances go for anything, I should say they were all on the war path." I made one more attempt to fraternize with them, NIAGARA 63 and only one. I came upon a camp of them gathered in the shade of a great tree, making wampum and moccasins, and addressed them in the language of friendship: "Noble Red Men, Braves, Grand Sachems, War Chiefs, Squaws, and High Muck-a-Mucks, the paleface from the land of the setting sun greets you! You, Beneficent polecat-you, Devourer of Mountains— you, Roaring Thundergust-you, Bully Boy with a Glass eye-the paleface from beyond the great waters greets you all! War and pestilence have thinned your ranks, and destroyed your once proud nation. Poker and seven-up, and a vain modern expense for soap, unknown to your glorious ancestors, have depleted your purses. Appropriating, in your simplicity, the property of others, has gotten you into trouble. Misrepresenting facts, in your simple innocence, has damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper. Trading for forty-rod whiskey, to enable you to get drunk and happy and tomahawk your families, has played the everlasting mischief with the picturesque pomp of your dress, and here you are, in the broad light of the nineteeth century, gotten up like the rag- tag and bobtail of the purlieus of New York. For shame! Remember your ancestors! Recall their mighty deeds! Remember Uncas!-and Red Jacket! -and Hole in the Day!-and Whoopdedoodledoo! Emulate their achievements! Unfurl yourselves un- der my banner, noble savages, illustrious gutter- snipes❞— C 64 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ! "Down wid him!" "Scoop the blaggard!" "Burn him!" "Hang him!" "Dhround him!" It was the quickest operation that ever was. I simply saw a sudden flash in the air of clubs, brick- bats, fists, bead-baskets, and moccasins—a single flash, and they all appeared to hit me at once, and no two of them in the same place. In the next instant the entire tribe was upon me. They tore half the clothes off me; they broke my arms and legs; they gave me a thump that dented the top of my head till it would hold coffee like a saucer; and, to crown their disgraceful proceedings and add insult to injury, they threw me over the Niagara Falls, and I got wet. About ninety or a hundred feet from. the top, the remains of my vest caught on a projecting rock, and I was almost drowned before I could get loose. I finally fell, and brought up in a world of white foam at the foot of the Fall, whose celled and bubbly masses towered up several inches above my head. Of course I got into the eddy. I sailed round and round in it forty-four times-chasing a chip and gaining on it— each round trip a half mile-reaching for the same bush on the bank forty-four times, and just exactly missing it by a hair's-breadth every time. At last a man walked down and sat down close to that bush, and put a pipe in his mouth, and lit a match, and followed me with one eye and kept the other on the match, while he sheltered it in his hands ***** NIAGARA 65 from the wind. Presently a puff of wind blew it out. The next time I swept around he said- “Got a match ?" "Yes; in my other vest. Help me out, please." "Not for Joe." When I came round again, I said- "Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of & drowning man, but will you explain this singular con- duct of yours ?" "With pleasure. I am the coroner. Don't hurry on my account. I can wait for you. But I wish I had a match." I said—“Take my place, and I'll go and get you one." He declined. This lack of confidence on his part created a coldness between us, and from that time forward I avoided him. It was my idea, in case any- thing happened to me, to so time the occurrence as to throw my custom into the hands of the opposition coroner over on the American side. At last a policeman came along, and arrested me for disturbing the peace by yelling at people on shore for help. The judge fined me, but I had the advan- tage of him. My money was with my pantaloons, and my pantaloons were with the Indians. Thus I escaped. I am now lying in a very critical condition. At least I am lying anyway-critical or not critical. I am hurt all over, but I cannot tell the full extent yet, because the doctor is not done taking 66 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES inventory. He will make out my manifest this eve- ning. However, thus far he thinks only sixteen of my wounds are fatal. I don't mind the others. Upon regaining my right mind, I said- "It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the bead work and moccasins for Niagara Falls, doctor. Where are they from?" 66 Limerick, my son." ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS Answers to Correspondents. 66 MORAL STATISTICIAN."--I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasion- ally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dan- gerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the ques- tion. You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, accord- ing to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and sur- vive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid 67 68 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesi- mal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; there- fore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash? It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know your- self that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, see- ing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your ears buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement of your income. Now you know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? f ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS 89 What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as "onery" and unlove- able as you are yourselves, by your villainous "moral statistics?" Now, I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it either; but I haven't a par- ticle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices. and so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove. "YOUNG AUTHOR."-Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brains. So far you are correct. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat-at least, not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual aver- age, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good, middling-sized whales. "SIMON WHEELER," Sonora.-The following simple and touching remarks and accompanying poem have just come to hand from the rich gold-mining region of Sonora:- 1 70 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES To Mr. Mark Twain: The within parson, which I have set to poetry under the name and style "He Done His Level Best," was one among the whitest men I ever see, and it an't every man that knowed him that can find it in his heart to say he's glad the poor cuss is busted and gone home to the States. He was here in an early day, and he was the handyst man about takin' holt of any- thing that come along you most ever see, I judge. He was a cheerful, stirrin' cretur, always doin' somethin', and no man can say he ever see him do anything by halvers. Preachin' was his nateral gait, but he warn't a man to lay back and twidle his thumbs because there didn't happen to be nothin' doin' in his own especial line-no, sir, he was a man who would meander forth and stir up something for hisself. His last acts was to go his pile on "kings-and" (calklatin' to fill, but which he didn't fill), when there was a “flush" out agin him, and naturally, you see, he went under. And so he was cleaned out, as you may say, and he struck the home-trail, cheerful but flat broke. I knowed this talonted man in Arkansaw, and if you would print this humble tribute to his gorgis abilities, you would greatly obleege his onhappy friend.” HE DONE HIS LEVEL BEST. Was he a mining on the flat- He done it with a zest; Was he a leading of the choir- He done his level best. P If he'd a reg'lar task to do, He never took no rest; Or if 'twas off-and-on-the same- He done his level best. If he was preachin' on his beat, He'd tramp from east to west, And north to south-in cold and heat He done his level best. ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS 71 X He'd yank a sinner outen (Hades),* And land him with the blest; Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again, And do his level best. He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray, And dance and drink and jest, And lie and steal-all one to him- He done his level best. Whate'er this man was sot to do, He done it with a zest; No matter what his contract was, HE'D DO HIS LEVEL BEST. Verily, this man was gifted with "gorgis abilities,' and it is a happiness to me to embalm the memory of their lustre in these columns. If it were not that the poet crop is unusually large and rank in California this year, I would encourage you to continue writing, Simon Wheeler; but, as it is, perhaps it might be too risky in you to enter against so much opposition. "" “PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR." No; you are not obliged to take greenbacks at par. "MELTON MOWBRAY," † Dutch Flat.-This corre- spondent sends a lot of doggerel, and says it has been *Here I have taken a slight liberty with the original MS. "Hades does not make such good metre as the other word of one syllable, but it sounds better. †This piece of pleasantry, published in a San Francisco paper, was mistaken by the country journals for seriousness, and many and loud were the denuncia- tions of the ignorance of author and editor, in not knowing that the lines in question were "written by Byron." 72 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES regarded as very good in Dutch Flat. I give a spec- imen verse :- "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold; And the sheen of his spears was like stars on the sea; When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee." There, that will do. That may be very good Dutch Flat poetry, but it won't do in the metropolis. It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like buttermilk gurgling from a jug. What the people ought to have is something spirited-something like "Johnny Comes Marching Home." However, keep on practising, and you may succeed yet. There is genius in you, but too much blubber. "ST. CLAIR HIGGINS." Los Angeles.- 'My life is a failure; I have adored, wildly, madly, and she whom I love has turned coldly from me and shed her affections upon another. What would you advise me to do?" You should set your affections on another, also- or on several, if there are enough to go round. Also, do everything you can to make your former flame unhappy. There is an absurd idea disseminated in novels, that the happier a girl is with another man, the happier it makes the old lover she has blighted. Don't allow yourself to believe any such nonsense as that. The more cause that girl finds to regret that she did not marry you, the more comfortable you will feel over it. It isn't poetical, but it is mighty sound doctrine. ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS 73 “ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.-"If it would take a can- non ball 3 1-3 seconds to travel four miles, and 3 3-8 seconds to travel the next four, and 3 5-8 to travel the next four, and if its rate of progress continued to diminish in the same ratio, how long would it take it to go fifteen hundred millions of miles? I don't know. "AMBITIOUS LEARNER," Oakland.-Yes; you are right-America was not discovered by Alexander Selkirk. "DISCARDED LOVER."-I loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha Howard, and intended to marry her. Yet, during my temporary absence at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones. Is my happiness to be thus blasted for life? Have I no redress?" Of course you have. All the law, written and un- written, is on your side. The intention and not the act constitutes crime-in other words, constitutes the deed. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it play- fully, and meaning no insult, it is not an insult. If you discharge a pistol accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him, but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the intention constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder. Ergo, if you had married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you would not actually be married to her at all, be- cause the act of marriage could not be complete with- out the intention. And ergo, in the strict spirit of the D 74 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and didn't do it, you are married to her all the same --because, as I said before, the intention constitutes the crime. It is as clear as day that Edwitha is your wife, and your redress lies in taking a club and muti- lating Jones with it as much as you can. Any man has a right to protect his own wife from the advances of other men. But you have another alternative- you were married to Edwitha first, because of your deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her for bigamy, in subsequently marrying Jones. But there is another phase in this complicated case. You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently, accord- ing to law, she is your wife-there is no getting around that; but she didn't marry you, and she never intended to marry you, you are not her husband of course. Ergo, in marrying Jones, she was guilty of bigamy, because she was the wife of another man at the time; which is all very well as far as it goes-but then, don't you see, she had no other husband when she married Jones, and consequently she was not guilty of bigamy. Now, according to this view of the case, Jones mar- ried a spinster, who was a widow at the same time and another man's wife at the same time, and yet who had no husband and never had one, and never had any intention of getting married, and therefore, of course, never had been married; and by the same reasoning you are a bachelor, because you have never been any one's husband; and a married man, because ! ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS 75 you have a wife living; and to all intents and pur- poses a widower, because you have been deprived of that wife; and a consummate ass for going off to Benicia in the first place, while things were so mixed, And by this time I have got myself so tangled up in the intricacies of this extraordinary case that I shall have to give up any further attempt to advise you— I might get confused and fail to make myself under- stood. I think I could take up the argument where I left off, and by following it closely awhile, perhaps I could prove to your satisfaction, either that you never existed at all, or that you are dead now, and consequently don't need the faithless Edwitha-I think I could do that, if it would afford you any comfort. "ARTHUR AUGUSTUS."-No; you are wrong; that is the proper way to throw a brickbat or a tomahawk; but it doesn't answer so well for a bouquet; you will hurt somebody if you keep it up. Turn your nosegay upside down, take it by the stems, and toss it with an upward sweep. Did you ever pitch quoits? that is the idea. The practice of recklessly heaving immense solid bouquets of the general size and weight of prize cabbages, from the dizzy altitude of the galleries, is dangerous and very reprehensible. Now, night before last, at the Academy of Music, just after Signorina had finished that exquisite melody, "The Last Rose of Summer," one of these floral pile-drivers came cleaving down through the atmosphere of applause, 76 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES and if she hadn't deployed suddenly to the right, it would have driven her into the floor like a shingle- nail. Of course that bouquet was well meant; but how would you like to have been the target? A sin- cere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it. “Young MOTHER."-And so you think a baby is a thing of beauty and a joy forever? Well, the idea is pleasing, but not original; every cow thinks the same of its own calf. Perhaps the cow may not think it so elegantly, but still she thinks it nevertheless. I honor the cow for it. We all honor the touching maternal instinct wherever we find it, be it in the home of luxury or in the humble cow-shed. But really, madam, when I come to examine the matter in all its bearings, I find that the correctness of your assertion does not assert itself in all cases. A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty; and inasmuch as babyhood spans. but three short years, no baby is competent to be a joy "forever." It pains me thus to demolish two- thirds of your pretty sentiment in a single sentence; but the position I hold in this chair requires that I shall not permit you to deceive and mislead the public with your plausible figures of speech. I know a female baby, aged eighteen months, in this city, which can- not hold out as a "joy" twenty-four hours on a stretch, let alone "forever." And it possesses some of the most remarkable eccentricities of character and ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS 77 appetite that have ever fallen under my notice. I will set down here a statement of this infant's ope- rations (conceived, planned, and carried out by itself, and without suggestion or assistance from its mother or any one else), during a single day; and what I shall say can be substantiated by the sworn testimony of witnesses. It commenced by eating one dozen large blue-mass pills, box and all; then it fell down a flight of stairs, and arose with a blue and purple knot on its fore- head, after which it proceeded in quest of further refreshment and amusement. It found a glass trinket ornamented with brass-work-smashed up and ate the glass, and then swallowed the brass. Then it drank about twenty drops of laudanum, and more than a dozen tablespoonfuls of strong spirits of cam- phor. The reason why it took no more laudanum was because there was no more to take. After this it lay down on its back, and shoved five or six inches of a silver-headed whale-bone cane down its throat, got it fast there, and it was all its mother could do to pull the cane out again, without pulling out some of the child with it. Then, being hungry for glass again, it broke up several wine-glasses, and fell to eating and swallowing the fragments, not minding a cut or two. Then it ate a quantity of butter, pepper, salt, and California matches, actually taking a spoonful of butter, a spoonful of salt, a spoonful of pepper, and three or four lucifer matches at each mouthful, (I 78 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES will remark here that this thing of beauty liked painted German lucifers, and eats all she can get of them; but she prefers California matches, which I regard as a compliment to our home manufactures of more than ordinary value, coming, as it does, from one who is too young to flatter.) Then she washed her head with soap and water, and afterwards ate what soap was left, and drank as much of the suds as she had room for; after which she sallied forth and took the cow familiarly by the tail, and got kicked heels over head. At odd times during the day, when this joy forever happened to have nothing particular on hand, she puts in the time by climbing up on places, and falling down off them, uniformly damaging her- self in the operation. As young as she is, she speaks many words tolerably distinctly; and being plain- spoken in other respects, blunt and to the point, she opens conversation with all strangers, male or female, with the same formula, "How do, Jim?" Not being familiar with the ways of children, it is possible that I have been magnifying into matter of surprise things which may not strike any one who is familiar with infancy as being at all astonishing. However, I can- not believe that such is the case, and so I repeat that my report of this baby's performances is strictly true; and if any one doubts it, I can produce the child. I will furthur engage that she will devour anything that is given her (reserving to myself only the right to exclude anvils), and fall down from any place to which ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS 79 she may be elevated (merely stipulating that her pref- erence for alighting on her head shall be respected, and, therefore, that the elevation chosen shall be high enough to enable her to accomplish this to her satis- faction.) But I find I have wandered from my sub- ject; so, without further argument, I will reiterate my conviction that not all babies are things of beauty and joys forever. “ARITHMETICUS." Virginia, Nevada.-"I am an enthusiastic student of mathematics, and it is so vexatious to me to find my progress constantly impeded by these mysterious arithmetical technicalities. Now do tell me what the difference is between geometry and conchology?" Here you come again with your arithmetical conun- drums, when I am suffering death with a cold in the head. If you could have seen the expression of scorn that darkened my countenance a moment ago, and was instantly split in every direction like a fractured looking-glass by my last sneeze, you never would have written that disgraceful question. Conchology is a science which has nothing to do with mathe- matics; it relates only to shells. At the same time, however, a man who opens oysters for a hotel, or shells a fortified town, or sucks eggs, is not, strictly speaking, a conchologist-a fine stroke of sarcasm that, but it will be lost on such an unintellectual clam as you. Now compare conchology and geometry together, and you will see what the difference is, and your question will be answered. But don't torture 80 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES map? me with any more arithmetical horrors until you know I am rid of my cold. I feel the bitterest animosity towards you at this moment-bothering me in this way, when I can do nothing but sneeze and rage and snort pocket-handkerchiefs to atoms. If I had you in range of my nose, now, I would blow your brains out. RAISING POULTRY Raising Poultry. S ERIOUSLY, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready sympathy in my breast. Even as a school-boy, poultry-raising was a study with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty night by insinuating the end of a warm board under their heels. By the time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry than any one individual in all the section round about there. The very chickens came to know my talent, by and by. The youth of both sexes ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that came to crow, "remained to pray," when I passed by. I have had so much experience in the raising of *Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a compli- mentary membership upon the author. 6 81 82 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES RETY." fowls that I can- not but think that a few hints from me might be useful to the So- ciety. The two methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other for winter. In the one case you start out with a friend along about 'eleven o'clock on a summer's night (not later, be- cause in some States espec- ially in California and Oregon- chickens always rouse up just at RAISING POULTRY 83 1 1 midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, accord- ing to the ease or difficulty they experience in getting the public waked up), and your friend carries with him a sack. Arrived at the hen-roost (your neigh- bor's, not your own), you light a match and hold it under first one and then another pullet's nose until they are willing to go into that bag without making any trouble about it. You then return home, either taking the bag with you or leaving it behind, accord- ing as circumstances shall dictate. N. B. I have seen the time when it was eligible and appropriate to leave the sack behind and walk off with considerable veloc- ity, without ever leaving any word where to send it. In the case of the other method mentioned for rais- ing poultry, your friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you carry a long slen- der plank. This is a frosty night, understand. Ar- rived at the tree, or fence, or other hen-roost (your own if you are an idiot), you warm the end of your plank in your friend's fire vessel, and then raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering chicken's foot. If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and step out and take up quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question in our minds, as it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not really and deliberately committing suicide in the second degree. 84 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES [But you enter into a contemplation of these legal refinements subsequently-not then]. When you wish to raise a fine, large, donkey-voiced Shanghai rooster, you do it with a lasso, just as you would a bull. It is because he must be choked, and choked effectually, too. It is the only good, certain way, for whenever he mentions a matter which he is cordially intested in, the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that he secures somebody else's immediate attention to it to, whether it be day or night. The Black Spanish is an exceedingly fine bird and a costly one. Thirty-five dollars is the usual figure, and fifty a not uncommon price for a specimen. Even its eggs are worth from a dollar to a dollar and a half a-piece, and yet are so unwholesome that the city physician seldom or never orders them for the work- house. Still I have once or twice procured as high as a dozen at a time for nothing, in the dark of the moon. The best way to raise the Black Spanish fowl is to go late in the evening and raise coop and all. The reason I recommend this method is, that the birds being so valuable, the owners do not permit them to roost around premiscuously, but put them in a coop as strong as a fire-proof safe, and keep it in the kitchen at night. The method I speak of is not always a bright and satisfying success, and yet there are so many little articles of vertu about a kitchen, that if you fail on the coop you can generally bring away something else. I brought away a nice steel trap one night, worth ninety cents. RAISING POULTRY 85 → But what is the use in my pouring out my whole intellect on this subject? I have shown the Western New York Poultry Society that they have taken to their bosom a party who is not a spring chicken by any means, but a man who knows all about poultry, and is just as high up in the most efficient methods of raising it as the President of the institution him- self. I thank these gentlemen for the honorary mem- bership they have conferred upon me, and shall stand at all times ready and willing to testify my good feeling and my official zeal by deeds as well as by this hastily penned advice and information. Whenever they are ready to go to raising poultry, let them call for me any evening after seven o'clock, and I shall be on hand promptly. : 86 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup. [As related to the author of this book by Mr. McWilliams, a pleasant New York gentleman whom the said author met by chance on a journey.] WE ELL, to go back to where I was before I di- gressed to explain to you how that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup, was rav- aging the town and driving all mothers mad with ter- ror, I called Mrs. McWilliam's attention to little Penelope and said: "Darling, I wouldn't let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were you.” "Precious, where is the harm in it?" said she, but at the same time preparing to take away the stick- for women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women. I replied: "Love, it is notorious that pine is the least nutri- tious wood that a child can eat.' My wife's hand paused, in the act of taking the stick, and returned itself to her lap. She bridled pre- ceptibly, and said: THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP 87 "Hubby, you know better than that. You know you do. Doctors all say that the turpentine in pine wood is good for weak back and the kidneys." "Ah-I was under a misapprehension. I did not know that the child's kidneys and spine were affected, and that the family physician had recommended—” "Who said the child's spine and kidneys were affected?" "My love, you intimated it.” "The idea! I never intimated anything of the kind." "Why my dear, it hasn't been two minutes since you said-" "Bother what I said! I don't care what I did say. There isn't any harm in the child's chewing a bit of pine stick if she wants to, and you know it perfectly well. And she shall chew it, too. So there, now!" "Say no more, my dear. I now see the force of your reasoning, and I will go and order two or three cords of the best pine wood to-day. No child of mine shall want while I—” "O please go along to your office and let me have some peace. A body can never make the simplest remark but you must take it up and go to arguing and arguing and arguing till you don't know what you are talking about, and you never do.” "Very well, it shall be as you say. But there is a want of logic in your last remark which-’ However, she was gone with a flourish before I could "" 8888 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES I finish, and had taken the child with her. That night at dinner she confronted me with a face as white as a sheet: "O, Mortimer, there's another! Little Georgie Gordon is taken.' "Membranous croup?" "Membranous croup." ر, "Is there any hope for him?" "None in the wide world. O, what is to become of us !" By and by a nurse brought in our Penelope to say good-night and offer the customary prayer at the mother's knee. In the midst of "Now I lay me down. to sleep," she gave a slight cough! My wife fell back like one stricken with death. But the next moment she was up and brimming with the activities which terror inspires. She commanded that the child's crib be removed from the nursery to our bed-room; and she went along to see the order executed. She took me with her, of course. We got matters arranged with speed. A cot bed was put up in my wife's dressing room for the nurse. But now Mrs. McWilliams said we were too far away from the other baby, and what if he were to have the symptoms in the night-and she blanched again, poor thing. We then restored the crib and the nurse to the nurs- ery and put up a bed for ourselves in a room adjoin- ing. THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP 89 Presently, however, Mrs. McWilliams said suppose the baby should catch it from Penelope? This thought struck a new panic to her heart, and the tribe of us could not get the crib out of the nursery again fast enough to satisfy my wife, though she assisted in her Quilling MPAR ATUITA 42 I own person and well nigh pulled the crib to pieces in her frantic hurry. We moved down stairs; but there was no place there to stow the nurse, and Mrs. McWilliams said the nurse's experience would be an inestimable help. So 90 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES we returned, bag and baggage, to our own bed-room once more, and felt a great gladness, like storm- buffeted birds that have found their nest again. Mrs. McWilliams sped to the nursery to see how things were going on there. She was back in a moment with a new dread. She said: "What can make Baby sleep so ?" I said: "Why, my darling, Baby always sleeps like a graven image.' "I know. I know; but there's something peculiar about his sleep, now. He seems to-to-he seems to breathe so regularly. O, this is dreadful." "But my dear he always breathes regularly.' "Oh, I know it, but there's something frightful about it now. His nurse is too young and inexpe- rienced. Maria shall stay there with her, and be on hand if anything happens. "That is a good idea, but who will help you?" "You can help me all I want. I wouldn't allow anybody to do anything but myself, any how, at such a time as this." "" "" "" * I said I would feel mean to lie abed and sleep, and leave her to watch and toil over our little patient all the weary night-but she reconciled me to it. So old Maria departed and took up her ancient quarters in the nursery. Penelope coughed twice in her sleep. "Oh, why don't that doctor come! Mortimer, this THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP 91 room is too warm. This room is certainly too warm. Turn off the register-quick!” I shut it off, glancing at the thermometer at the same time, and wondering to myself if 70 was too warm for a sick child. The coachman arrived from down town, now, with the news that our physician was ill and confined to his bed. Mrs. McWilliams turned a dead eye upon me, and said in a dead voice: "There is a Providence in it. It is foreordained. He never was sick before.-Never. We have not been living as we ought to live, Mortimer. Time and time again I have told you so. Now you see the result. Our child will never get well. Be thankful if you can forgive yourself; I never can forgive myself." I said, without intent to hurt, but with heedless choice of words, that I could not see that we had been living such an abandoned life. "Mortimer! Do you want to bring the judgment upon Baby, too!" Then she began to cry, but suddenly exclaimed: "The doctor must have sent medicines !" I said: "Certainly. They are here. I was only waiting for you to give me a chance." "Well do give them to me! every moment is precious now? Don't you know that But what was the use in sending medicines, when he knows that the disease is incurable?" 92 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES I said that while there was life there was hope. "Hope! Mortimer, you know no more what you are talking about than the child unborn. If you would-. As I live, the directions say give one tea- spoonful once an hour! Once an hour!-as if we had a whole year before us to save the child in! Mortimer, please hurry. Give the poor perishing thing a table- spoonful, and try to be quick! "Why, my dear, a table-spoonful might—' "Don't drive me frantic!..... There, there, there, my precious, my own; it's nasty bitter stuff, but it's good for Nelly—good for mother's precious darling; and it will make her well. There, there, there, put the little head on Mamma's breast and go to sleep, and pretty soon—Oh, I know she can't live till morning! Mor- timer, a table-spoonful every half hour will—. Oh, the child needs belladonna too; I know she does- and aconite. Get them, Mortimer. Now do let me have my way. You know nothing about these things." We now went to bed, placing the crib close to my wife's pillow. All this turmoil had worn upon me, and within two minutes I was something more than half asleep. Mrs. McWilliams roused me: "Darling, is that register turned on?” "No." "" sdag "I thought as much. Please turn it on at once. This room is cold." I turned it on, and presently fell asleep again. I was aroused once more: THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP 93 ) "Dearie, would you mind moving the crib to your side of the bed? It is nearer the register." I moved it, but had a collision with the rug and woke up the child. I dozed off once more, while my wife quieted the sufferer. But in a little while these words came murmuring remotely through the fog of my drowsiness: "Mortimer, if we only had some goose-grease—will you ring?" I climbed dreamily out, and stepped on a cat, which responded with a protest and would have got a con- vincing kick for it if a chair had not got it instead. "Now, Mortimer, why do you want to turn up the gas and wake up the child again?" "Because I want to see how much I am hurt, Caro- line." "Well look at the chair, too-I have no doubt it is ruined. Poor cat, suppose you had-" "Now I am not going to suppose anything about the cat. It never would have occurred if Maria had been allowed to remain here and attend to these duties, which are in her line and are not in mine." "Now Mortimer, I should think you would be ashamed to make a remark like that. It is a pity if you cannot do the few little things I ask of you at such an awful time as this when our child—”? "There, there, I will do anything you want. But I can't raise anybody with this bell. They're all gone to bed. Where is the goose-grease?" 鷳 ​94 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES "On the mantel piece in the nursery. If you'll step there and speak to Maria-” I fetched the goose-grease and went to sleep again; once more I was called: "Mortimer, I so hate to disturb you, but the room is still too cold for me to try to apply this stuff. €900) Would you mind lighting the fire? It is all ready to touch a match to." I dragged myself out and lit the fire, and then sat down disconsolate. THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP 95 " "Mortimer, don't sit there and catch your death of cold. Come to bed." As I was stepping in, she said: "But wait a moment. Please give the child some more of the medicine." Which I did. It was a medicine which made a child more or less lively; so my wife made use of its waking interval to strip it and grease it all over with the goose-oil. I was soon asleep once more, but once more I had to get up. "Mortimer, I feel a draft. I feel it distinctly. There is nothing so bad for this disease as a draft. Please move the crib in front of the fire." I did it; and collided with the rug again, which I threw in the fire. Mrs. McWilliams sprang out of bed and rescued it and we had some words. I had another trifling interval of sleep, and then got up, by request, and constructed a flax-seed poultice. This was placed upon the child's breast and left there to do its healing work. A wood fire is not a permanent thing. I got up every twenty minutes and renewed ours, and this gave Mrs. McWilliams the opportunity to shorten the times of giving the medicines by ten minutes, which was a great satisfaction to her. Now and then, between times, I reorganized the flax-seed poultices, and applied sinapisms and other sorts of blisters where unoccupied places could be found upon the child. Well, toward morning the wood gave out and 96 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES my wife wanted me to go down cellar and get some more. I said: "My dear, it is a laborious job, and the child must be nearly warm enough, with her extra clothing. Now mightn't we put on another layer of poultices and-" I did not finish, because I was interrupted. Ilugged wood up from below for some little time, and then turned in and fell to snoring as only a man can whose strength is all gone and whose soul is worn out. Just at broad daylight I felt a grip on my shoulder that brought me to my senses suddenly.-My wife was glaring down upon me and gasping. As soon as she could command her tongue she said: "It is all over! All over! The child's perspiring! What shall we do?" "Mercy, how you terrify me! I don't know what we ought to do. Maybe if we scraped her and put her in the draft again-" "O, idiot! There is not a moment to lose! Go for the doctor. Go yourself. Tell him he must come, dead or alive." I dragged that poor sick man from his bed and brought him. He looked at the child and said she was not dying. This was joy unspeakable to me, but it made my wife as mad as if he had offered her a personal affront. Then he said the child's cough was only caused by some trifling irritation or other in the throat. At this I thought my wife had a mind to THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP 97 show him the door.-Now the doctor said he would make the child cough harder and dislodge the trouble. So he gave her something that sent her into a spasm of coughing, and presently up came a little wood splinter or so. "This child has no membranous croup," said he. "She has been chewing a bit of pine shingle or some- thing of the kind, and got some little slivers in her throat. They won't do her any hurt.' "No," said I, "I can well believe that. Indeed the turpentine that is in them is good for certain sorts of diseases that are peculiar to children. My wife will tell you so." "" But she did not. She turned away in disdain and left the room; and since that time there is one episode in our life which we never refer to. Hence the tide of our days flows by in deep and untroubled serenity. [Very few married men have such an experience as McWilliams's, and so the author of this book thought that maybe the novelty of it would give it a pass- ing interest to the reader.] 7 E MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES : My First Literary Venture. I WAS a very smart child at the age of thirteen- an unusually smart child, I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sen- sation in the community, It did, indeed, and I was proud of it, too. I was a printer's "devil,” and a progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars a year in advance-five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, and unmarketable tur- nips), and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ah I didn't I want to try! Higgins was the editor on the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could no longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore! He had concluded he wouldn't. The village S 98 MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE 99 was full of it for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine opportu- nity. I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole mat- ter, and then il- lustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wood- en type with a jack-knife—one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sound- ing the depth of the water with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately fun- ny, and was densely uncon- wgi 100 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES scious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting mat- ter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of gratuitous rascality and "see him squirm.' "" I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the Burial of "Sir John Moore"-and a pretty erude parody it was, too. Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrag- eously-not because they had done anything to de- serve it, but merely because I thought it was my duty to make the paper lively. Next I gently touched up the newest stranger— the lion of the day, the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb of the first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the State. He was an inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy "poetry" for the "Journal," about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed, "TO MARY IN H-L," meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But while setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I compressed it into a snappy foot-note at the bottom -thus:-"We will let this thing pass, just this once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly that we have a character to sustain, and * MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE 101 from this time forth when he wants to commune with his friends in h-1, he must select some other medium than the columns of this journal!" The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much attention as those playful trifles of mine. For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand-a novelty it had not experienced before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped in with a double- barreled shot-gun early in the forenoon. When he found it was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the damage, he simply pulled my ears and went away; but he threw up his situation that night and left town for good. The tailor came with his goose and a pair of shears; but he despised me too, and departed for the South that night. The two lampooned citizens came with threats of libel, and went away incensed at my insignificance. The country editor pranced in with a warwhoop next day, suffer- ing for blood to drink; but he ended by forgiving me cordially and inviting me down to the drug store to wash away all animosity in a friendly bumper of "Fahnestock's Vermifuge." It was his little joke. My uncle was very angry when he got back—unreas- onably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had given the paper, and considering also that grat- itude for his preservation ought to have been upper- most in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so wonderfully escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, 102 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES J and getting his head shot off. But he softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had actually booked the unparalled number of thirty-three new subscribers, and had the vegetables to show for it, cordwood, cabbage, beans, and unsalable turnips enough to run the family for two years! HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK How the Author was Soldin Newark. IT T is seldom pleasant to tell on one's self but sometimes it is a sort of relief to a man to make a confession. I wish to unburden my mind now, and yet I almost believe that I am moved to do it more be- cause I long to bring censure upon another man than because I desire to pour balm upon my wounded heart. (I don't know what balm is, but I believe it is the correct expression to use in this connection- never having seen any balm.) You may remember that I lectured in Newark lately for the young gentle- men of the Society? I did at any rate. During the afternoon of that day I was talking with one of the young gentlemen just referred to, and he said he had an uncle who, from some cause or other, seemed to have grown permanently bereft of all emotion. And with tears in his eyes, this young man said, “Oh, if I could only see him laugh once more! Oh, if I could only see him weep!" I was touched. I could never withstand distress. I said: "Bring him to my lecture. I'll start him for you." 103 104 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES "Oh, if you could but do it! If you could but do it, all our family would bless you for evermore-for he is so very dear to us. Oh, my benefactor, can you make him laugh? can you bring soothing tears to those parched orbs?” I was profoundly moved. I said: "My son, bring the old party round. I have got some jokes in that lecture that will make him laugh if there is any laugh in him; and if they miss fire, I have got some others that will make him cry or kill him, one or the other. Then the young man blessed me, and wept on my neck, and went after his uncle. He placed him in full view, in the second row of benches that night, and I began on him. I tried him with mild jokes, then with severe ones; I dosed him with bad jokes and riddled him with good ones; I fired old stale jokes into him, and peppered him fore and aft with red-hot new ones; I warmed up to my work. and assaulted him on the right and left, in front and behind; I fumed and sweated and charged and ranted till I was hoarse and sick, and frantic and furious; but I never moved him once-I never started a smile or a tear! Never a ghost of a smile, and never a suspicion of moisture! I was astounded. I closed the lecture at last with one despairing shriek—with one wild burst of humor, and hurled a joke of supernatural atrocity full at him! Then I sat down bewildered and exhausted. The president of the society came up and bathed "" HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK 105 my head with cold water, and said: "What made you carry on so towards the last?" I said: "I was trying to make that confounded old fool laugh in the second row.” And he said: "Well, you were wasting your time, be- cause he is deaf and dumb, and as blind as a badger!” Now, was that any way for that old man's nephew to impose on a stranger and orphan like me? I ask you as a man and brother, if that was any way for him to do? ' MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES RAY The Office Bore. HE E arrives just as regularly as the clock strikes nine in the morning. And so he even beats the editor sometimes, and the porter must leave his work and climb two or three pair of stairs to unlock the "Sanctum" door and let him in. He lights one of the office pipes-not reflecting, perhaps, that the editor may be one of those "stuck-up" people who would as soon have a stranger defile his tooth-brush as his pipe-stem. Then he begins to loll-for a person who can consent to loaf his useless life away in ignomin- ious indolence has not the energy to sit up straight. He stretches full length on the sofa awhile; then draws up to half-length; then gets into a chair, hangs his head back and his arms abroad, and stretches his legs till the rims of his boot-heels rest upon the floor; by and by sits up and leans forward, with one leg or both over the arm of the chair. But it is still observ- able that with all his changes of position, he never assumes the upright or a fraudful affectation of dig- nity. From time to time he yawns, and stretches, and scratches himself with a tranquil, mangy enjoy- ment, and now and then he grunts a kind of stuffy, 106 THE OFFICE BORE 107 over-fed grunt, which is full of animal contentment. At rare and long intervals, however, he sighs a sigh that is the eloquent expression of a secret confession, to wit: "I am useless and a nuisance, a cumberer of the earth." The bore and his comrades-for there are usually from two to four on hand, day and night -mix into the conversation when men come in to see the editors for a moment on business; they hold noisy talks among themselves about politics in particular, and all other subjects in general-even warming up, after a fashion, sometimes, and seeming to take almost a real interest in what they are discussing. They ruthlessly call an editor from his work with such a remark as: "Did you see this, Smith, in the 'Gazette?'”’ and proceed to read the paragraph while the sufferer reins in his impatient pen and listens: they often loll and sprawlround the office hour after hour, swapping anecdotes, and relating personal experiences to each other-hairbreadth escapes, social encounters with distinguished men, election reminiscences, sketches of odd characters, etc. And through all those hours. they never seem to comprehend that they are robbing the editors of their time, and the public of journalistic excellence in next day's paper. At other times they drowse, or dreamily pore over exchanges, or droop limp and pensive over the chair-arms for an hour. Even this solemn silence is small respite to the editor, for the next uncomfortable thing to having people look over his shoulders, perhaps, is to have them sit 108 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES by in silence and listen to the scratching of his pen. If a body desires to talk private business with one of the editors, he must call him outside, for no hint milder than blasting powder or nitro-glycerine would be likely to move the bores out of listening distance. To have to sit and endure the presence of a bore day after day; to feel your cheerful spirits begin to sink as his footstep sounds on the stair, and utterly vanish away as his tiresome form enters the door; to suffer through his anecdotes and die slowly to his reminis cences; to feel always the fetters of his clogging pres- ence; to long hopelessly for one single day's privacy; to note with a shudder, by and by, that to contem- plate his funeral in fancy has ceased to soothe, to imagine him undergoing in strict and fearful detail the tortures of the ancient Inquisition has lost its power to satisfy the heart, and that even to wish him millions and millions and millions of miles in Tophet is able to bring only a fitful gleam of joy; to have to endure all this, day after day, and week after week, and month after month, is an affliction that tran- scends any other that men suffer. Physical pain is pastime to it, and hanging a pleasure excursion, JOHNNY GREER Johnny Greer. THE HE church was densely crowded that lovely summer Sabbath," said the Sunday-school superintendent, "and all, as their eyes rested upon the small coffin, seemed impressed by the poor black boy's fate. Above the stillness the pastor's voice rose, and chained the interest of every ear as he told, with many an envied compliment, how that the brave, noble, daring little Johnny Greer, when he saw the drowned body sweeping down toward the deep part of the river whence the agonized parents never could have recovered it in this world, gallantly sprang into the stream, and at the risk of his life towed the corpse to shore, and held it fast till help came and secured it. Johnny Greer was sitting just in front of me. A ragged street boy, with eager eye, turned upon him instantly, and said in a hoarse whisper- ""No; but did you though?' "'Yes.' ""Towed the carkiss ashore and saved it yo'self?' "'Yes.' ""Cracky! What did they give you?' 109 110 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ཁྐྲཝ་ ༣༡༢ * * (C 'Nothing.' ""W-h-a-t! [with intense disgust.] D'you know what I'd a done! I'd a anchored him out in the stream, and said, Five dollars, gents, or you can't have yo' nigger,'' THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT I The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract. IN N as few words as possible I wish to lay before the nation what share, howsoever small, I have had in this matter-this matter which has so exercised the public mind, engendered so much ill-feeling, and so filled the newspapers of both continents with dis- torted statements and extravagant comments. The origin of this distressful thing was this—and I assert here that every fact in the following resume can be amply proved by the official records of the General Government:- John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung county, New Jersey, deceased, contracted with the General Government, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861, to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of thirty barrels of beef. Very well. He started after Sherman with the beef, but when he got to Washington Sherman had gone to Manas- sas; so he took the beef and followed him there, but arrived too late; he followed him to Nashville, and 111 112 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES 1. from Nashville to Chattanooga, and from Chatta- nooga to Atlanta-but he never could overtake him. At Atlanta he took a fresh start and followed him clear through his march to the sea. He arrived too late again by a few days; but hearing that Sherman was going out in the Quaker City excursion to the Holy Land, he took shipping for Beirut, calculating to head off the other vessel. When he arrived in Jerusalem with his beef, he learned that Sherman had not sailed in the Quaker City, but had gone to the Plains to fight the Indians. He returned to America, and started for the Rocky Mountains. After sixty- eight days of arduous travel on the Plains, and when he had got within four miles of Sherman's head- quarters, he was tomahawked and scalped, and the Indians got the beef. They got all of it but one bar- rel. Sherman's army captured that, and so even in death, the bold navigator partly fulfilled his con- tract. In his will, which he had kept like a journal, he bequeathed the contract to his son Bartholomew W. Bartholomew W. made out the following bill, and then died :- THE UNITED STATES In account with JOHN WILSON MACKENZIE, of New Jersey, deceased......DR. To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100,.. To traveling expenses and transportation.... ד 9... Total...... $3,000 .14,000 $17,000 Rec'd Pay't. He died then; but he left the contract to Wm. J. Martin, who tried to collect it, but died before he got through. He left it to Barker J. Allen, and he tried THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT 113 to collect it also. He did not survive. Barker J. Allen left it to Anson G. Rogers, who attempted to collect it, and got along as far as the Ninth Auditor's Office, when Death the great Leveller, came all unsum- moned, and foreclosed on him also. He left the bill to a relative of his in Connecticut, Vengeance Hop- kins by name, who lasted four weeks and two days, and made the best time on record, coming within one of reaching the Twelfth Audi- tor. In his will he gave the con- tract bill to his uncle, by the name of O-be- Joyful Johnson. It was too un- dermining for Joyful. His HAIR AY. - last words were: "Weep not for me-I am willing to go." And so he was, poor soul. Seven people inherited the contract after that, but they all died. So it came into my hands at last. It fell to me through a relative by the name of Hubbard-Bethlehem Hubbard of Indiana. He had had a grudge against me for a long time; 8 114 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES . but in his last moments he sent for me, and forgave me everything, and, weeping gave me the beef con- tract. This ends the history of it up to the time that I succeeded to the property. I will now endeavor to set myself straight before the nation in everything that concerns my share in the matter. I took this beef contract, and the bill for mileage and transportation, to the President of the United States. He said, "Well, sir, what can I do for you?" I said, "Sire, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861, John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Che- mung county, New Jersey, deceased, contracted with the General Government to furnish to General Sher- man the sum total of thirty barrels of beef-" He stopped me there, and dismissed me from his presence-kindly, but firmly. The next day I called on the Secretary of State. He said, "Well, sir?" I said, "Your Royal Highness: on or about the 10th of October, 1861, John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotter- dam, Chemung county, New Jersey, deceased, con- tracted with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of thirty barrels of beef" "That will do, sir-that will do; this office has noth- ing to do with contracts for beef." I was bowed out. I thought the matter all over, and finally, the following day, I visited the Secretary THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT 115 ד 99 of the Navy, who said, "Speak quickly, sir; do not keep me waiting." I said. "Your Royal Highness: on or about the 10th of October, 1861, John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotter- dam, Chemung county, New Jersey, deceased, con- tracted with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of thirty barrels of beef- Well, it was as far as I could get. He had nothing to do with beef contracts for General Sherman either. I began to think it was a curious kind of a Govern- ment. It looks somehow as if they wanted to get out of paying for that beef. The following day I went to the Secretary of the Interior. I said, "Your Imperial Highness, on or about the 10th day of October—' "That is sufficient, sir. I have heard of you before. Go, take your infamous beef contract out of this establishment. The Interior Department has noth- ing whatever to do with subsistence for the army." I went away. But I was exasperated now. I said I would haunt them; I would infest every department of this iniquitous Government till that contract business was settled. I would collect that bill, or fall, as fell my predecessors, trying. I assailed the Postmaster General; I besieged the Agricultural Department; I waylaid the Speaker of the House of Representatives. They had nothing to do with army contracts for beef. I moved upon the Commissioner of the Patent Office. 116 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES + T I said, "Your August Excellency, on or about "Perdition! have you got here with your incendiary beef contract, at last? We have nothing to do with beef contracts for the army, my dear sir." "Oh, that is all very well-but somebody has got to pay for that beef. It has got to be paid now, too, or I'll confiscate this old Patent Office and every thing in it.' " "" "But, my dear sir" "It don't make any difference, sir. The Patent Office is liable for that beef, I reckon; and liable or not liable, the Patent Office has got to pay for it." Never mind the details. It ended in a fight. The Patent office won. But I found out something to my advantage. I was told that the Treasury Depart- ment was the proper place for me to go. I went there. I waited two hours and a half, and then I was admitted to the First Lord of the Treasury. I said, "Most noble, grave, and reverend Signor, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861, John Wilson Macken-"" "That is sufficient, sir. I have heard of you. Go to the First Auditor of the Treasury." I did so. He sent me to the Second Auditor. The Second Auditor sent me to the Third, and the Third sent me to the First Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division. This began to look like business. He examined his books and all his loose papers, but found no minute of the beef contract. I went to the THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT 117 Second Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division. He examined his books and his loose papers, but with no success. I was encouraged. During that week I got as far as the Sixth Comptroller in that division; the next week I got through the Claims Department; the third week I began and completed the Mislaid Con- tracts Department, and got a foothold in the Dead Reckoning Department. I finished that in three days. There was only one place left for it now. I laid siege to the Commissioner of Odds and Ends. To his clerk, rather he was not there himself. There were sixteen beautiful young ladies in the room, writing in books, and there were seven well-favored young clerks show- ing them how. The young women smiled up over their shoulders, and the clerks smiled back at them, and all went merry as a marriage bell. Two or three clerks that were reading the newspapers looked at me rather hard, but went on reading, and nobody said anything. However, I had been used to this kind of alacrity from Fourth-Assistant-Junior Clerks all through my eventful career, from the very day 1 entered the first office of the Corn-Beef Bureau clear till I passed out of the last one in the Dead Reckoning Division. I had got so accomplished by this time that I could stand on one foot from the moment I entered an office till a clerk spoke to me, without changing more than two, or maybe three times. • So I stood there till I had changed four different times. Then I said to one of the clerks who was reading- 118 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES "Illustrious Vagrant, where is the Grand Turk?" "What do you mean, sir?-whom do you mean? If you mean the Chief of the Bureau, he is out." "Will he visit the harem to-day?” The young man glared upon me awhile, and then went on reading his paper. But I knew the ways of those clerks. I knew I was safe if he got through be- fore another New York mail arrived. He only had two more papers left. After awhile he finished them, and then he yawned and asked me what I wanted. "Renowned and honored Imbecile: On or about-" "You are the beef contract man, Give me your papers." He took them, and for a long time he ransacked his odds and ends. Finally he found the North-West Passage, as I regarded it—he found the long-lost record of that beef contract-he found the rock upon which so many of my ancestors had split before they ever got to it. I was deeply moved. And yet I re- joiced-for I had survived. I said with emotion, "Give it to me. The Government will settle now." He waved me back, and said there was something yet to be done first. "Where is this John Wilson Mackenzie ?" said he. "Dead." "When did he die?" "He didn't die at all-he was killed." "How?" "Tomahawked." 'THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT 119 "Who tomahawked him?” "Why, an Indian, of course. You didn't suppose it was the superintendent of a Sunday-school, did you?” "No. An Indian, was it?" "The same.' "Name of the Indian ?" "His name? I don't know his name." “Must have his name. Who saw the tomahawking done!" “I don't know.” "You were not present yourself, then?" "Which you can see by my hair. I was absent." "Then how do you know that Mackenzie is dead?” "Because he certainly died at that time, and I have every reason to believe that he has been dead ever since. I know he has, in fact." "" "We must have proofs. Have you got the Indian ?" "Of course not.” "Well, you must get him. Have you got the toma- hawk?" "" "I never thought of such a thing. "You must get the tomahawk. You must produce the Indian and the tomahawk. If Mackenzie's death can be proven by these, you can then go before the commission appointed to audit claims with some show of getting your bill under such headway that your children may possibly live to receive the money and enjoy it. But that man's death must be proven. However, I may as well tell you that the Government 120 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES will never pay that transportation and those travel- ing expenses of the lamented Mackenzie. It may possibly pay for the barrel of beef that Sherman's soldiers captured, if you can get a relief bill through Congress making an appropriotion for that purpose; but it will not pay for the twenty-nine barrels the Indians ate." "Then there is only a hundred dollars due me, and that isn't certain! After all Mackenzie's travels in Europe, Asia. and America with that beef; after ail his trials and tribulations and transportation; after the slaughter of all those innocents that tried to col- lect that bill! Young man, why didn't the First Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division tell me this?" "He didn't know anything about the genuiness of you claim." "Why didn't the Second tell me? why didn't the Third? why didn't all those divisions and depart- ments tell me?" "None of them knew. We do things by routine here. You have followed the routine and found out what you wanted to know. It is the best way. It is the only way. It is very regular, and very slow, but it is very certain.” "Yes, certain death. It has been, to the most of our tribe. I begin to feel that I, too, am called. Young man, you love the bright creature yonder wtih the gentle blue eyes and the steel pens behind her ears-I see it in your soft glances; you wish to marry her-but you are poor. Here, hold out your hand- THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT 121 F here is the beef contract; go, take her and be happy! Heaven bless you, my children!" This is all I know about the great beef contract, that has created so much talk in the community. The clerk to whom I bequeathed it died. I know nothing further about the contract, or any one con- nected with it. I only know that if a man lives long enough he can trace a thing through the Circumlocu- tion Office of Washington, and find out, after much labor and trouble and delay, that which he could have found out on the first day if the business of the Cir- cumlocution Office were as ingeniously systematized as it would be if it were a great private mercantile institution. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES * The Case of George Fisher. THIS HIS is history. It is not a wild extravaganza, like "John Williamson Mackenzie's Great Beef Contract," but is a plain statement of facts and cir- cumstances with which the Congress of the United States has interested itself from time to time during the long period of half a century. I will not call this matter of George Fisher's a great deathless and unrelenting swindle upon the Govern- ment and people of the United States-for it has been so decided, and I hold that it is a grave and solemn wrong for a writer to cast slurs or call names when such is the case-but will simply present the evidence and let the reader deduce his own verdict. Then we shall do nobody injustice, and our consciences shall be clear. *Some years ago, when this was first published, few people believed it, but considered it a mere extravaganza. In these latter days it seems hard to realize that there was ever a time when the robbing of our government was a novelty. The very man who showed me where to find the documents for this case was at that very time spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Washington for a mail steamship concern, in the effort to procure a subsidy for the company-a fact which was a long time in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent Congressional investigation. 122 THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER 123 On or about the 1st day of September 1813, the Creek war being then in progress in Florida, the crops, herds, and houses of Mr. George Fisher, a citizen, were destroyed, either by the Indians or by the United States troops in pursuit of them. By the terms of the law, if the Indians destroyed the property, there was no relief for Fisher; but if the troops destroyed it, the Government of the United States was debtor to Fisher for the amount involved. George Fisher must have considered that the Indians destroyed the property, because, although he lived several years afterward, he does not appear to have ever made any claim upon the Government. In the course of time Fisher died, and his widow married again. And by and by, nearly twenty years after that dimly-remembered raid upon Fisher's corn- fields, the widow Fisher's new husband petitioned Congress for pay for the property, and backed up the petition with many depositions and affidavits which purported to prove that the troops, and not the Indians, destroyed the property; that the troops, for some inscrutable reason, deliberately burned down "houses" (or cabins) valued at $600, the same be- longing to a peaceable private citizen, and also destroyed various other properly belonging to the same citizen. But Congress declined to believe that the troops were such idiots (after overtaking and scattering a band of Indians proved to have been found destroying Fisher's property) as to calmly continue the work of destruction themselves, and 124 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES make a complete job of what the Indians had only commenced. So Congress denied the petition of the heirs of George Fisher in 1832, and did not pay them a cent. We hear no more from them officially until 1848, sixteen years after their first attempt on the Treasury, and a full generation after the death of the man whose fields were destroyed. The new generation of Fisher heirs then came forward and put in a bill for damages. The Second Auditor awarded them $8,873, being half the damage sustained by Fisher. The Auditor said the testimony showed that at least half the destruction was done by the Indians, "before the troops started in pursuit," and of course the Govern- ment was not responsible for that half. 2. That was in April, 1848. In December, 1848, the heirs of George Fisher, deceased, came forward and pleaded for a "revision" of their bill of damages. The revision was made, but nothing new could be found in their favor except an error of $100 in the former calculation. However, in order to keep up the Fisher family, the Auditor concluded to go back and allow interest from the date of the first petition (1832) to the date when the bill of damages was awarded. This sent the Fishers home happy with sixteen years' interest on $8,873, the same amounting to $8,997.94. Total, $17,870.94. 3. For an entire year the suffering Fisher family remained quiet-even satisfied, after a fashion. Then they swooped down upon the Government with their } THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER 125 wrongs once more. That old patriot, Attorney- General Toucey, burrowed through the musty papers of the Fishers and discovered one more chance for the desolate orphans-interest on that original award of $8,873 from date of destruction of the property (1813) up to 1832! Result, $10,004.89 for the indi- gent Fishers. So now we have:-First, $8,873 dam- ages; second, interest on it from 1832 to 1848, $8,997.94; third, interest on it dated back to 1813, $10,004.89. Total, $27,875.83! What better in- vestment for a great-grandchild than to get the Indians to burn a cornfield for him sixty or seventy years before his birth, and plausibly lay it on lunatic United States troops! 4. Strange as it may seem, the Fishers let Congress alone for five years-or, what is perhaps more likely, failed to make themselves heard by Congress for that length of time. But at last in 1854, they got a hear- ing. They persuaded Congress to pass an act requir- ing the Auditor to re-examine their case. But this time they stumbled upon the misfortune of an honest Secretary of the Treasury (Mr. James Guthrie), and he spoiled everything. He said in very plain language that the Fishers were not only not entitled to another cent, but that those children of many sorrows and acquainted with grief had been paid too much already. 5. Therefore another interval of rest and silence ensued—an interval which lasted four years-viz., till 1858. The "right man in the right place" was then : # 126 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Secretary of War-John B. Floyd, of peculiar renown! Here was a master intellect; here was the very man to succor the suffering heirs of dead and forgotten Fisher. They came up from Florida with a rush-a great tidal wave of Fishers freighted with the same old musty documents about the same immortal corn- fields of their ancestor. They straightway got an Act passed transferring the Fisher matter from the dull Auditor to the ingenious Floyd. What did Floyd do? He said, "IT WAS PROVED that the Indians de- stroyed everything they could before the troops entered in pursuit." He considered, therefore, that what they destroyed must have consisted of "the houses with all their contents, and the liquor” (the most trifling part of the destruction, and set down at only $3200 all told), and that the Government troops then drove them off and calmly proceeded to destroy- Two hundred and twenty acres of corn in the field, thirty-five acres of wheat, and nine hundred and eighty-six head of live stock! [What a singularly in- telligent army we had in those days, according to Mr. Floyd-though not according to the Congress of 1832.] So Mr. Floyd decided that the Government was not responsible for that $3200 worth of rubbish which the Indians destroyed, but was responsible for the prop- erty destroyed by the troops-which property con- sisted of (I quote from the United States Senate document)- 200 THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER 127 Corn at Bassett's Creek, Cattle,........ Stock hogs,... Drove hogs, Wheat,. Hides..... Corn on the Alabama River, Total,.. : DOLLARS. .3,000 5,000 .1,050 .1,204 ....350 .4,000 .3,500 •• .18,104 That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the "full value of the property destroyed by the troops." He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, TOGETHER WITH INTEREST FROM 1813. From this new sum total the amounts already paid to the Fishers were de- ducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction under forty thousand dollars) was handed to them, and again they retired to Florida in a condition of temporary tranquility. Their ancestor's farm had now yielded them, altogether, nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash. 6. Does the reader suppose that that was the end of it? Does he suppose those diffident Fishers were satisfied? Let the evidence show. The Fishers were quiet just two years. Then they came swarming up out of the fertile swamps of Florida with their same old documents, and besieged Congress once more. Congress capitulated on the first of June, 1860, and instructed Mr. Floyd to overhaul those papers again and pay that bill. A Treasury clerk was ordered to go through those papers and report to Mr. Floyd what amount was still due the emaciated Fishers. This clerk (I can produce him whenever he is wanted) 128 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES discovered what was apparently a glaring and recent forgery in the papers, whereby a witness's testimony as to the price of corn in Florida in 1813 was made to name double the amount which that witness had originally specified as the price! The clerk not only called his superior's attention to this thing, but in making up his brief of the case called particular atten- tion to it in writing. That part of the brief never got before Congress, nor has Congress ever yet had a hint of a forgery existing among the Fisher papers. Never- theless, on the basis of the double prices (and totally ignoring the clerk's assertion that the figures were manifestly and unquestionably a recent.forgery), Mr. Floyd remarks in his new report that "the testimony particularly in regard to the corn crops DEMANDS A MUCH HIGHER ALLOWANCE than any heretofore made by the Auditor or myself." So he estimates the crop at sixty bushels to the acre (double what Florida acres produce), and then virtuously allows pay for only half the crop, but allows two dollars and a half a bushel for that half, when there are rusty old books and documents in the Congressional library to show just what the Fisher testimony showed before the forgery-viz., that in fall of 1813 corn was only worth from $1.25 to $1.50 a bushel. Having accom- plished this, what does Mr. Floyd do next? Mr. Floyd ("with an earnest desire to execute truly the legislative will," as he piously remarks) goes to work and makes out an entirely new bill of Fisher damages, THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER 129 and in this new bill he placidedly ignores the Indians altogether-puts no particle of the destruction of the Fisher property upon them, but, even repenting him of charging them with burning the cabins and drink- ing the whisky and breaking the crockery, lays the entire damage at the door of the imbecile United States troops, down to the very last item! And not only that, but uses the forgery to double the loss of corn at "Bassett's Creek," and uses it again to abso- lutely treble the loss of corn on the "Alabama River." This new and ably conceived and executed bill of Mr. Floyd's figures up as follows (I copy again from the printed U. S. Senate document) The United States in account with the legal representatives of George Fisher, deceased. 1813-To 550 head of cattle, at 10 dollars.... To 86 head of drove hogs. To 350 head of stock hogs....... TO 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT'S CREEK. To 8 barrels of whisky. To 2 barrels of brandy To 1 barrel of rum...... ………… .... To dry goods and merchandise in store..... To 35 acres of wheat..... To 2,000 hides..... To furs and hats in store... To crockery ware in store To smiths' and carpenters' tools.. To houses burned and destroyed. To 4 dozen bottles of wine..... 1814-To 120 aeres of corn on Alabama River. To crops of peas, fodder, etc.......... **** Total...... To interest on $22,202, from July 1813 to November 1860, 47 years and 4 months..... To interest on $12,750, from September 1814 to November 1860, 46 years and 2 months......... Total................... DOL. C. ...5,500 00 .1,204 00 .1,750 00 .6,000 00 350 00 280 00 70 00 .1,100 00 350 00 .4,000 00 600 00 100 00 250 00 600 00 48 00 .9,500 00 3,250 00 .34,952 00 ...63,053 68 .35,317 50 .133.323 18 130 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES 2. He puts everything in this time. He does not even allow that the Indians destroyed the crockery or destroyed the four dozen bottles of (currant) wine. When it came to supernatural comprehensiveness in "gobbling," John B. Floyd was without his equal, in his own or any other generation. Subtracting from the above total the $67,000 already paid to George Fisher's implacable heirs, Mr. Floyd an- nounced that the Government was still indebted to them in the sum of sixty-six thousand five hundred and nineteen dollars and eighty-five cents, "which," Mr. Floyd complacently remarks, "will be paid, ac- cordingly, to the administrator of the estate of George Fisher, deceased, or to his attorney in fact.” But, sadly enough for the destitute orphans, a new President came in just at this time, Buchanan and Floyd went out, and they never got their money. The first thing Congress did in 1861 was to rescind the resolution of June 1, 1870, under which Mr. Floyd had been ciphering. Then Floyd (and doubtless the heirs of George Fisher likewise) had to give up finan- cial business for a while, and go into the Confederate army and serve their country. Were the heirs of George Fisher killed? No. They are back now at this very time (July 1870), beseech- ing Congress through that blushing and diffident creature, Garrett Davis, to commence making pay- ments again on their interminable and insatiable bill of damages for corn and whisky destroyed by a gang · THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER 131 ए of irresponsible Indians, so long ago that even Gov- ernment red-tape has failed to keep consistent and intelligent track of it. Now, the above are facts. They are history. Any one who doubts it can send to the Senate Document of the Capitol for H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 21, 36th Con- gress, 2nd Session, and for S. Ex. Doc. No. 106, 41st. Congress 2nd Session, and satisfy himself. The whole case is set forth in the first volume of the Court of Claims Reports. It is my belief that as long as the continent of America holds together, the heirs of George Fisher, deceased, will still make pilgrimages to Washington from the swamps of Florida, to plead for just a little more cash on their bill of damages (even when they received the last of that sixty-seven thousand dollars, they said it was only one-fourth what the Govern- ment owed them on that fruitful corn-field), and as long as they choose to come, they will find Garrett Davises to drag their vampire schemes before Con- gress. This is not the only hereditary fraud (if fraud it is—which I have before repeatedly remarked is not proven) that is being quietly handed down from gen- eration to generation of fathers and sons, through the persecuted Treasury of the United States. : MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy. IN N San Francisco, the other day, "A well-dressed boy, on his way to Sunday-school, was arrested and thrown into the city prison for stoning China- men." What a commentary is this upon human justice! What sad prominence it gives to our human disposition to tyrannize over the weak! San Fran- cisco has little right to take credit to herself for her treatment of this poor boy. What had the child's education been? How should he suppose it was wrong to stone a Chinaman? Before we side against him, along with outraged San Francisco, let us give him a chance-let us hear the testimony for the defence. He was a "well-dressed" boy, and a Sunday-school scholar, and therefore, the chances are that his parents were intelligent, well-to-do people, with just enough natural villiany in their composition to make them yearn after the daily papers, and enjoy them; and so this boy had opportunities to learn all through the week how to do right, as well as on Sunday. It was in this way that he found out that the great 19 132 DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY 133 commonwealth of California imposes an unlawful mining-tax upon John the foreigner, and allows Pat- rick the foreigner to dig gold for nothing-probably 'because the degraded Mongol is at no expense for whisky, and the refined Celt cannot exist without it. It was in this way that he found out that a respect- able number of the tax-gatherers-it would be unkind to say all of them-collect the taxes twice, instead of once; and that, inasmuch as they do it solely to dis- courage Chinese immigration into the mines, it is a thing that is much applauded, and likewise regarded as singularly facetious. It was in this way that he found out that when a white man robs a sluice-box (by the term white man is meant Spaniards, Mexicans, Portuguese, Irish, Hondurans, Peruvians, Chileans, &c., &c.), they make him leave the camp; and when a Chinaman does that thing, they hang him. It was in this way that he found out that in many districts of the vast Pacific coast, so strong is the wild, free-love of justice in the hearts of the people, that whenever any secret and mysterious crime is committed, they say, "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall," and go straightway and swing a Chinaman. It was in this way that he found out that by study- ing one half of each day's "local items," it would appear that the police of San Francisco were either asleep or dead, and by studying the other half it 134 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES would seem that the reporters were gone mad with admiration of the energy, the virtue, the high effect- iveness, and the dare-devil intrepidity of that very police-making exultant mention of how "the Argus- eyed officer So-and-so," captured a wretched knave of a Chinaman who was stealing chickens, and brought him gloriously to the city prison; and how "the gal- lant officer Such-and-such-a-one," quietly kept an eye on the movements of an "unsuspecting, almond-eyed son of Confucius" (your reporter is nothing if not facetious), following him around with that far-off look of vacancy and unconsciousness always so finely affected by that inscrutible being, the forty-dollar po- liceman, during a waking interval, and captured him at last in the very act of placing his hands in a suspic- ious manner upon a paper of tacks, left by the owner in an exposed situation; and how one officer per- formed this prodigious thing, and another officer that, and another the other-and pretty much every one of these performances having for a dazzling central incident a Chinaman guilty of a shilling's worth of crime, an unfortunate, whose misdemeanor must be hurraed into something enormous in order to keep the public from noticing how many really important rascals went uncaptured in the meantime, and how overrated those glorified policemen actually are. It was in this way that the boy found out that the Legislature, being aware that the Constitution has made America an asylum tor the poor and the DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY 135 oppressed of all nations, and that, therefore the poor and oppressed who fly to our shelter must not be charged a disabling admission fee, made a law that every Chinaman, upon landing, must be vaccinated upon the wharf, and pay to the State's appointed officer ten dollars for the service, when there are plenty of doctors in San Francisco who would be glad enough to do it for him for fifty cents. It was in this way that the boy found out that a Chinaman had no rights that any man was bound to respect; that he had no sorrows that any man was bound to pity, that neither his life nor his liberty was worth the purchase of a penny when a white man needed a scapegoat; that nobody loved Chinamen, that nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffering when it was convenient to inflict it; every- body, individuals, communities, the majesty of the State itself, joined in hating, abusing, and persecuting these humble strangers. And, therefore, what could have been more natural than for this sunny-hearted boy, tripping along to Sunday-school, with his mind teeming with freshly- learned incentives to high and virtuous action, to say to himself- "Ah, there goes a Chinaman! God will not love me if I do not stone him." And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail. Everything conspired to teach him that it was a 136 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES high and holy thing to stone a Chinamen, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty than he is pun- ished for it-he, poor chap, who has been aware all his life that one of the principal recreations of the police, out toward the Gold Refinery, is to look on with tranquil enjoyment while the butchers of Bran- nan Street set their dogs on unoffending Chinamen, and make them flee for their lives. * Keeping in mind the tuition in the humanities which the entire "Pacific coast" gives its youth, there is a very sublimity of incongruity in the virtuous flourish with which the good city fathers of San Francisco proclaim (as they have lately done) that "The police are positively ordered to arrest all boys of every description and wherever found, who engage in assaulting Chinamen." Still, let us be truly glad they have made the order, notwithstanding its inconsistency; and let us rest perfectly confident that the police are glad, too. Because there is no personal peril in arresting boys, provided they be of the small kind, and the reporters will have to laud their performances just as loyally as ever, or go without items. * I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at present of one particular one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their dogs on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the hilarity of the occa- sion by knocking some of the Chinaman's teeth down his throat with half a brick. This incident sticks in my memory with a more malevolent tenacity perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to publish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the paper, 1 DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY 137 } The new form for local items in San Francisco will now be "The ever vigilent and efficient officer So- and-So succeeded, yesterday afternoon, in arresting Master Tommy Jones, after a determined resistance," etc., etc., followed by the customary statistics and final hurrah, with its unconscious sarcasm: "We are happy in being able to state that this is the forty-seventh boy arrested by this gallant officer since the new ordinance went into effect. The most extraordinary activity prevails in the police depart- ment. Nothing like it has been seen since we can remember." P !! MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ፡ The Judge's "Spirited Woman.” "I WAS sitting here," said the judge, "in this old pulpit, holding court, and we were trying a big, wicked-looking Spanish desperado for killing the hus- band of a bright, pretty Mexican woman. It was a lazy summer day, and an awfully long one, and the witnesses were tedious. None of us took any interest in the trial except that nervous, uneasy devil of a Mexican woman-because you know how they love and how they hate, and this one had loved her hus- band with all her might, and now she had boiled it all down into hate, and stood there spitting it at that Spaniard with her eyes; and I tell you she would stir me up, too, with a little of her summer lightning, occasionally. Well, I had my coat off and my heels. up, lolling and sweating, and smoking one of those cabbage cigars the San Francisco people used to think were good enough for us in those times; and the lawyers they all had their coats off, and were smok- ing and whittling, and the witnesses the same, and so was the prisoner. Well, the fact is, there warn't any interest in a murder trial then, because the fellow was 138 THE JUDGE'S "SPIRITED WOMAN” 139 I always brought in "not guilty," the jury expecting him to do as much for them sometime; and, although the evidence was straight and square against the Spaniard, we knew we could not convict him without seeming to be rather high-handed and sort of reflect- ing on every gentleman in the community; for there warn't any carriages and liveries then, and so the only 'style' there was, was to keep your private graveyard. But that woman seemed to have her heart set on hanging that Spaniard; and you'd ought to have seen how she would glare on him a minute, and then look up at me in her pleading way, and then turn and for the next five minutes search the jury's faces, and by and by drop her face in her hands for just a little while as if she was most ready to give up; but out she'd come again directly, and be as live and anxious as ever. But when the jury announced the verdict-Not Guilty, and I told the prisoner he was acquitted and free to go, that woman rose up till she appeared to be as tall and grand as a seventy-four- gun-ship, and says she- 66 6 ''Judge, do I understand you to say that this man is not guilty, that murdered my husband without any cause before my own eyes and my little children's, and that all has been done to him that ever justice and the law can do?' ""The same,' says I. "And then what do you reckon she did? Why, she turned on that smirking Spanish fool like a wild cat, 140 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES न and out with a 'navy' and shot him dead in open court!" "That was spirited, I am willing to admit." “Wasn't it, though?" said the judge admiringly. "I wouldn't have missed it for anything. I adjourned court right on the spot, and we put on our coats and went out and took up a collection for her and her cubs, and sent them over the mountains to their friends. Ah, she was a spirited wench!" MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP! My Late Senatorial Secretaryship. I AM AM not a private secretary to a senator any more, now. I held the berth two months in secur- ity and in great cheerfulness of spirit, but my bread began to return from over the waters, then—that is to say my works came back and revealed themselves. I judged it best to resign. The way of it was this. My employer sent for me one morning tolerably early, and, as soon as I had finished inserting some conun- drums clandestinely into his last great speech upon finance, I entered the presence. There was something portentous in his appearance. His cravat was un- tied, his hair was in a state of disorder, and his countenance bore about it the signs of a suppressed storm. He held a package of letters in his tense grasp, and I knew that the dreaded Pacific mail was in. He said- "I thought you were worthy of confidence." I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "I gave you a letter from certain of my constituents in the State of Nevada, asking the estab- lishment of a post-office at Baldwin's Ranch, and told 141 142 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES you to answer it, as ingeniously as you could, with arguments which should persuade them that there was no real necessity for an office at that place." I felt easier. "Oh, if that is all, sir, I did do that." "Yes, you did. I will read your answer, for your own humiliation : "WASHINGTON, Nov. 24. "Messrs. Smith, Jones, and others. “‘GENTLEMEN: What the mischief do you suppose you want with a post-office at Baldwin's Ranche? It would not do you any good. If any letters came there, you couldn't read them, you know; and, besides, such letters as ought to pass through, with money in them, for other localities, would not be likely to get through, you must perceive at once; and that would make trouble for us all. No, don't bother about a post-office in your camp. I have your best interests at heart, and feel that it would only be an ornamental folly. What you want is a nice jail, you know—a nice substantial jail and a free school. These will be a lasting benefit to you. These will make you really contented and happy. I will move in the matter at once. 'Very truly, etc., ""MARK TWAIN. "For James W. N**, U. S. Senator.' "That is the way you answered that letter. Those people say they will hang me, if I ever enter that dis- trict again; and I am perfectly satisfied they will, too." "Well, sir, I did not know I was doing any harm. I only wanted to convince them." "Ah. Well you did convince them, I make no man- ner of doubt. Now, here in another specimen. I gave MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP 143 you a petition from certain gentlemen of Nevada, praying that I would get a bill through Congress incorporating the Methodist Episcopal Church of the State of Nevada. I told you to say, in reply, that the creation of such a law came more properly within the province of the State Legislature; and to endeavor to show them that, in the present feebleness of the religious element in that new commonwealth, the expediency of incorporating the church was question- able. What did you write? "'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24. ""Rev. John Halifax and others. "GENTLEMEN: You will have to go to the State Legislature about that speculation of yours-Congress don't know anything about religion. But don't you hurry to go there, either; because this thing you propose to do out in that new country isn't expe- dient-in fact, it is ridiculous. Your religious people there are too feeble, in intellect, in morality, in piety-in everything, pretty much. You had better drop this-you can't make it work. You can't issue stock on an incorporation like that or if you could, it would only keep you in trouble all the time. The other denomi- nations would abuse it, and "bear" it, and "sell it short,” and break it down. They would do with it just as they would with one of your silver mines out there-they would try to make all the world believe it was "wildcat." You ought not to do anything that is calculated to bring a sacred thing into disrepute. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves-that is what I think about it. You close your petition with the words: "And we will ever pray." I think you had better-you need to do it. ''Very truly, etc., 'MARK TWAIN. "For James W. N**, U. S. Senator,' 144 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES "That luminous epistle finishes me with the relig ious element among my constituents. But that my political murder might be sure, some evil instinct prompted me to hand you this memorial from the grave company of elders composing the Board of Aldermen of the city of San Francisco, to try your hand upon—a memorial praying that the city's right to the water-lots upon the city front might be estab- lished by law of Congress. I told you this was a dangerous matter to move in. I told you to write a non-committal letter to the Aldermen-an ambiguous letter-a letter that should avoid, as far as possible, all real consideration and discussion of thə water-lot question. If there is any feeling left in you-any shame surely this letter you wrote, in obedience to that order, ought to evoke it, when its words fall upon your ears: ""WASHINGTON, Nov. 27. "The Hon. Board of Aldermen, etc. “'GENTLEMEN: George Washington, the revered Father of his Country is dead. His long and brilliant career is closed, alas! forever. He was greatly respected in this section of the country, and his untimely decease cast a gloom over the whole community. He died on the 14th day of December, 1799. He passed peacefully away from the scene of his honors and his great achievements, the most lamented hero and the best beloved that ever earth hath yielded unto Death. At such a time as this, you speak of water- lots!-what a lot was his! ""What is fame! Fame is an accident. Sir Isaac Newton dis- covered an apple falling to the ground—a trivial discovery, truly, and one which a million men had made before him-but his parents MY LATE.SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP 145 CC were influential, and so they tortured that small circumstance into something wonderful, and, lo! the simple world took up the shout and, in almost the twinkling of an eye, that man was famous. Treasure these thoughts. 'Poesy, sweet poesy, who shall estimate what the world owes to thee! "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow- And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go." "Jack and Gill went up the hill To draw a pail of water; Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Gill came tumbling after." : For simplicity, elegance of diction, and freedom from immoral tendencies, I regard those two poems in the light of gems. They are suited to all grades of intelligence, to every sphere of life—to the field, to the nursery, to the guild. Especially should no Board of Aldermen be without them. ""MARK TWAIN. ""For James W. N**, U. S. Senator.' "Venerable fossils! write again. Nothing improves one so much as friendly correspondence. Write again—and if there is anything in this memorial of yours that refers to anything in particular, do not be backward about explaining it. We shall always be happy to hear you chirp. Very truly etc. That is an atrocious, a ruinous epistle! Distrac- tion." "Well, sir, I am really sorry if there is anything wrong about it—but-but it appears to me to dodge the water-lot question." "Dodge the mischief! Oh!-but never mind. As long as destruction must come now, let it be complete. Let it be complete-let this last of your performances, 10 G 146 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES which I am about to read, make a finality of it. I am a ruined man. I had my misgivings when I gave you the letter from Humboldt, asking that the post route from Indian Gulch to Shakespeare Gap and intermediate points, be changed partly to the old Mormon trail. But I told you it was a delicate question, and warned you to deal with it deftly—to answer it dubiously, and leave them a little in the dark. And your fatal imbecility impelled you to make this disastrous reply. I should think you would stop your ears, if you are not dead to all shame: “'WASHINGTON, Nov. 30. •* "Messrs. Perkins, Wagner, et al. "GENTLEMEN: It is a delicate question about this Indian trail, but, handled with proper deftness and dubiousness, I doubt not we shall succeed in some measure or otherwise, because the place where the route leaves the Lassen Meadows, over beyond where those two Shawnee chiefs, Dilapidated-Vengeance and Biter-of-the- Clouds, were scalped last winter, this being the favorite direction to some, but others preferring something else in consequence of things, the Mormon trail leaving Mosby's at three in the morning, and passing through Jawbone Flat to Blucher, and then down by Jug-IIandle, the road passing to the right of it, and naturally leaving it on the right, too, and Dawson's on the left of the trail where it passes to the left of said Dawson's and onward thence to Tomahawk, thus making the route cheaper, easier of access to all who can get at it, and compassing all the desirable objects so considered by others, and, therefore, conferring the most good upon the greatest number, and, consequently, I am encouraged to hope we shall. However, I shall be ready, and happy, to afford you still further information upon the subject, from time to time, MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP 147 as you may desire it, and the Post-Office Department be enabled to furnish it to me. Very truly, etc. " "MARK TWAIN, "For James W. N**, U. S. Senator.' "There—now what do you think of that?” “Well, I don't know, sir. It—well, it appears to me-to be dubious enough.' "" "Du-leave the house! I am a ruined man. Those Humboldt savages never will forgive me for tangling their brains up with this inhuman letter, I have lost the respect of the Methodist Church, the Board of Aldermen-______"" “Well, I haven't anything to say about that, be- cause I may have missed it a little in their cases, but I was too many for the Baldwin's Ranch people, General!" "Leave the house! Leave it for ever and for ever, too!" I regarded that as a sort of covert intimation that my service could be dispensed with, and so I resigned. I never will be a private secretary to a senator again. You can't please that kind of people. They don't know anything. They can't appreciate a party's efforts." 1 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES A Fashion Item. ΑΤ T General G―'s reception the other night, the most fashionably dressed lady was Mrs. G. C. She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front but with a good deal of rake to it-to the train, I mean; it was said to be two or three yards long. One could see it creeping along the floor some little time after the woman was gone. Mrs. C. wore also a white bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck, with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves. She had on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely high up the midst of that barren waste of neck and shoulders. Her hair was frizzled into a tangled chapparel, forward of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly bound and plaited into a stump like a pony's tail, and furthermore was canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red velvet crupper, whose forward extremity was made fast with a half-hitch around a hairpin on the top of her head. Her whole top hamper was neat and becoming. She had a beautiful complexion when she first came, but it 148 A FASHION ITEM 149 faded out by degrees in an unaccountable way. How- ever, it is not lost for good. I found the most of it on my shoulder afterwards. (I stood near the door when she squeezed out with the throng.) There were other ladies present, but I only took notes of one as a specimen. I would gladly enlarge upon the subject were I able to do it justice. в sphere th MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Riley---Newspaper Correspondent. NE of the best men in Washington-or elsewhere -is RILEY, correspondent of one of the great San Francisco dailies. ONE Riley is full of humor, and has an unfailing vein of irony, which makes his conversation to the last degree entertaining (as long as the remarks are about some- body else). But, notwithstanding the possession of these qualities, which should enable a man to write a happy and appetizing letter, Riley's newspaper letters often display a more than earthly solemnity, and likewise an unimaginative devotion to petrified facts, which surprise and distress all men who know him in his unofficial character. He explains this curious. thing by saying that his employers sent him to Wash- ington to write facts, not fancy, and that several times he has come near losing his situation by insert- ing humorous remarks which, not being looked for at headquarters, and consequently not understood, were thought to be dark and bloody speeches intended. to convey signals and warnings to murderous secret societies, or something of that kind, and so were 150 · RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT 151 scratched out with a shiver and a prayer and cast into the stove. Riley says that sometimes he is so afflicted with a yearning to write a sparkling and absorbingly readable letter that he simply cannot resist it, and so he goes to his den and revels in the delight of untramelled scribbling; and then, with suf- fering such as only a mother can know, he destroys the pretty children of his fancy and reduces his letter to the required dismal accuracy. Having seen Riley do this very thing more than once, I know whereof I speak. Often I have laughed with him over a happy passage, and grieved to see him plough his pen through it. He would say, "I had to write that or die; and I've got to scratch it out or starve. They wouldn't stand it, you know." I think Riley is about the most entertaining com- pany I ever saw. We lodged together in many places in Washington during the winter of '67-8, moving comfortably from place to place, and attracting attention by paying our board-a course which can- not fail to make a person conspicuous in Washington. Riley would tell all about his trip to California in the early days, by the way of the Isthmus and the San Juan river; and about his baking bread in San Fran- cisco to gain a living, and setting up ten-pins, and practising law, and opening oysters, and delivering lectures, and teaching French, and tending bar, and reporting for the newspapers, and keeping dancing- schools, and interpreting Chinese in the courts—which 152 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES latter was lucrative, and Riley was doing handsomely and laying up a little money when people began to find fault because his translations were too "free," a thing for which Riley considered he ought not to be held responsible, since he did not know a word of the Chinese tongue, and only adopted interpreting as means of gaining an honest livelihood. Through the machinations of enemies he was removed from the position of official interpreter, and a man put in his place who was familiar with the Chinese language, but did not know any English. And Riley used to tell about publishing a newspaper up in what is Alaska now, but was only an iceberg then, with a population composed of bears, walruses, Indians, and other ani- mals; and how the iceberg got adrift at last, and left all his paying subscribers behind, and as soon as the commonwealth floated out of the jurisdiction of Russia the people rose and threw off their allegiance and ran up the English flag, calculating to hook on and become an English colony as they drifted along down the British Possessions; but a land breeze and a crooked current carried them by, and they ran up the Stars and Stripes and steered for California, missed the connection again and swore allegiance to Mexico, but it wasn't any use; the anchors came home every time, and away they went with the north- east trades drifting off side-ways toward the Sandwich Islands, whereupon they ran up the Cannibal fiag and had a grand human barbecue in honor of it, in which it RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT 153 was noticed that the better a man liked a friend the better he enjoyed him; and as soon as they got fairly within the tropics the weather got so fearfully hot that the iceberg began to melt, and it got so sloppy under foot that it was almost impossible for ladies to get about at all; and at last, just as they came in sight of the islands, the melancholy remnant of the once majestic iceberg canted first to one side and then to the other, and then plunged under for ever, carry- ing the national archives along with it—and not only the archives and the populace, but some eligible town lots which had increased in value as fast as they diminished in size in the tropics, and which Riley could have sold at thirty cents a pound and made himself rich if he could have kept the province afloat ten hours longer and got her into port. Riley is very methodical, untiringly accommodat- ing, never forgets anything that is to be attended to, is a good son, a staunch friend, and a permanent reliable enemy. He will put himself to any amount of trouble to oblige a body, and therefore always has his hands full of things to be done for the helpless and the shiftless. And he knows how to do nearly every- thing, too. He is a man whose native benevolence is a well-spring that never goes dry. He stands always ready to help whoever needs help, as far as he is able -and not simply with his money, for that is a cheap and common charity, but with hand and brain, and fatigue of limb and sacrifice of time. This sort of men is rare. 154 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Riley has a ready wit, a quickness and aptness at selecting and applying quotations, and a countenance that is as solemn and as blank as the back side of a tombstone when he is delivering a particularly exas- perating joke. One night a negro woman was burned to death in a house next door to us, and Riley said that our landlady would be oppressively emotional at breakfast, because she generally made use of such opportunities as offered, being of a morbidly senti- mental turn, and so we should find it best to let her talk along and say nothing back-it was the only way to keep her tears out of the gravy. Riley said there never was a funeral in the neighborhood but that the gravy was watery for a week. And, sure enough, at breakfast the landlady was down in the very sloughs of woe-entirely broken- hearted. Everything she looked at reminded her of that poor old negro woman, and so the buckwheat cakes made her sob, the coffee forced a groan, and when the beefsteak came on she fetched a wail that made our hair rise. Then she got to talking about deceased, and kept up a steady drizzle till both of us were soaked through and through. Presently she took a fresh breath and said, with a world of sobs- "Ah, to think of it, only to think of it!-the poor old faithful creature. For she was so faithful. Would you believe it, she had been a servant in that self- same house and that self-same family for twenty-seven years come Christmas, and never a cross word and S RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT 155 + never a lick! And, oh, to think she should meet such a death at last!-a-sitting over the red-hot stove at three o'clock in the morning and went to sleep and fell on it and was actually roasted! Not just frizzled up a bit, but literally roasted to a crisp! Poor faith- ful creature, how she was cooked! I am but a poor woman, but even if I have to scrimp to do it, I will put up a tombstone over that lone sufferer's grave— and Mr. Riley if you would have the goodness to think up a little epitaph to put on it which would sort of describe the awful way in which she met her—” "Put it, 'Well done, good and faithful servant,' said Riley, and never smiled. """ MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES A Fine Old Man⋅ OHN Wagner, the oldest man in Buffalo-one hundred and four years old-recently walked a mile and a half in two weeks. JOH He is as cheerful and bright as any of these other old men that charge around so persistently and tire- somely in the newspapers, and in every way as remarkable. Last November he walked five blocks in a rain- storm, without any shelter but an umbrella, and cast his vote for Grant, remarking that he had voted for forty-seven presidents-which was a lie. His "second crop" of rich brown hair arrived from New York yesterday, and he has a new set of teeth coming-from Philadelphia. He is to be married next week to a girl one hundred and two years old, who still takes in washing. They have been engaged eighty years, but their parents persistently refused their consent until three days ago. John Wagner is two years older than the Rhode Island veteran, and yet has never tasted a drop of liquor in his life—unless-unless you count whisky. 156 ށި SCIENCE vs. LUCK Science vs. Luck. ΑΤ T that time, in Kentucky (said the Hon. Mr. K −), the law was very strict against what is termed "games of chance." About a dozen of the boys were detected playing "seven-up" or "old sledge" for money, and the grand jury found a true bill against them. Jim Sturgis was retained to defend them when the case came up, of course. The more he studied over the matter, and looked into the evidence, the plainer it was that he must lose a case at last-there was no getting around that painful fact. Those boys had certainly been betting money on a game of chance. Even public sympathy was roused in behalf of Sturgis. People said it was a pity to see him mar his successful career with a big prominent case like this, which must go against him, But after several restless nights an inspired idea flashed upon Sturgis, and he sprang out of bed de- lighted. He thought he saw his way through. The next day he whispered around a little among his clients and a few friends, and then when the case came up in court he acknowledged the seven-up and the 1 157 158 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES · betting, and, as his sole defence, had the astounding effrontery to put in the plea that old sledge was not a game of chance! There was the broadest sort of a smile all over the faces of that sophisticated audience. The judge smiled with the rest. But Sturgis maintained a countenance whose earnestness was even severe. The opposite counsel tried to ridicule him out of his position, and did not succeed. The judge jested in a ponderous judicial way about the thing, but did not move him. The matter was becom- ing grave. The judge lost a little of his patience, and said the joke had gone far enough. Jim Sturgis said he knew of no joke in the matter-his clients could not be punished for indulging in what some people chose to consider a game of chance until it was proven that it was a game of chance. Judge and counsel said that would be an easy matter, and forthwith called Deacons Job, Peters, Burke, and Johnson, and Dom- inies Wirt and Miggles, to testify; and they unani- mously and with strong feeling put down the legal quibble of Sturgis by pronouncing that old sledge was a game of chance. "What do you call it now?" said the judge. "I call it a game of science!" retorted Sturgis; "and I'll prove it, too!” They saw his little game. He brought in a cloud of witnesses, and produced an overwhelming mass of testimony, to show that SCIENCE vs. LUCK 159 old sledge was not a game of chance but a game of science. Instead of being the simplest case in the world, it had somehow turned out to be an excessively knotty one. The judge scratched his head over it a while, and said there was no way of coming to a determina- tion, because just as many men could be brought into court who would testify on one side as could be found to testify on the other. But he said he was willing to do the fair thing by all parties, and would act upon any suggestion Mr. Sturgis would make for the solu- tion of the difficulty. Mr. Sturgis was on his feet in a second. "Impanel a jury of six of each, Luck versus Science. Give them candles and a couple of decks of cards. Send them into the jury room, and just abide by the result!" There was no disputing the fairness of the proposi- tion. The four deacons and the two dominies were sworn in as the chance "jurymen," and six inveterate old seven-up professors were chosen to represent the "science" side of the issue. They retired to the jury room. In about two hours Deacon Peters sent into court to borrow three dollars from a friend. [Sensation.] In about two hours more Dominie Miggles sent into court to borrow a "stake" from a friend. [Sensation.] During the next three or four hours the other dominie and the other deacons sent into court for small loans. 160 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES And still the packed audience waited, for it was a prodigious occasion in Bull's Corners, and one in which every father of a family was necessarily interested. The rest of the story can be told briefly. About day- light the jury came in, and Deacon Job, the foreman, read the following VERDICT. We, the jury in the case of the Commonwealth of Kentucky vs. John Wheeler et al., have carefully con- sidered the points of the case, and tested the merits of the several theories advanced, and do hereby unanimously decide that the game commonly known as old sledge or seven-up is eminently a game of science and not of chance. In demonstration whereof it is hereby and herein stated, iter ated, reiterated, set forth, and made manifest that, during the entire night, the "chance" men never won a game or turned a jack, although both feats were common and frequent to the opposition; and furthermore, in support of this our verdict, we call attention to the significant fact that the "chance" men are all busted, and the "science" men have got the money. It is the delib- erate opinion of this jury, that the "chance" theory concerning seven-up is a pernicious doctrine, and calculated to inflict untold suffering and pecuniary loss upon any community that takes stock in it. "That is the way that seven-up came to be set SCIENCE vs. LUCK 161 "" apart and particularized in the statute-books of Kentucky as being a game not of chance but of science, and therefore not punishable under the law, said Mr. K. "That verdict is of record, and holds good to this day." N 11 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES The Killing of Julius Caesar "Localized.' 99 Being the only true and reliable account ever published; taken from the Roman "Daily Evening Fasces," of the date of that tremendous occurrence. N OTHING in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfation as gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder, and writing them up with aggravating circumstantiality, He takes a living delight in this labor of love—for such it is to him especially if he knows that all the other papers have gone to press, and his will be the only one that will contain the dreadful intelligence. A feeling of regret has often come over me that I was not reporting in Rome when Cæsar was killed-re- porting on an evening paper, and the only one in the city, and getting at least twelve hours ahead of the morning paper boys with this most magnificent "item" that ever fell to the lot of the craft. Other events have happened as startling as this, but none that possessed so peculiarly all the characteristics of the favorite "item" of the present day, magnified into 162 THE KILLING OF JULIUS CÆSAR “LOCALIZED" 163 } grandeur and sublimity by the high rank, fame, aud social and political standing of the actors in it. However, as I was not permitted to report Cæsar's assassination in the regular way, it has at least afforded me rare satisfaction to translate the follow- ing able account of it from the original Latin of the Roman Daily Evening Fasces of that date-second edition. "Our usually quiet city of Rome was thrown into a state of wild excitement yesterday by the occurrence of one of those bloody affrays which sicken the heart and fill the soul with fear, while they inspire all thinking men with forbodings for the future of a city where human life is held so cheaply, and the gravest laws are so openly set at defiance. As the result of that affray, it is our pain- ful duty, as public journalists to record the death of one of our most esteemed citizens-a man whose name is known wherever this paper circulates and whose fame it has been our pleasure and our privilege to extend, and also to protect from the tongue of slander and falsehood, to the best of our poor ability. We refer to Mr. J. Cæsar, the Emperor-elect. "The facts of the case, as nearly as our reporter could determine them from the conflicting statements of eye-witnesses, were about as follows The affair was an election row, of course. Nine-tenths of the ghastly butcheries that disgrace the city now-a-days grow out of the bickerings and jealousies and animosities engendered by these accursed elections. Rome would be the gainer by it if her very constables were elected to serve a century; for in our expe- rience we have never even been able to choose a dog-pelter without celebrating the event with a dozen knock-downs and a general cramming of the station-house with drunken vagabonds over- night. It is said that when the immense majority for Cæsar at the polls in the market was declared the other day, and the crown was 164 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES offered to that gentleman, even his amazing unselfishness in refus- ing it three times was not sufficient to save him from the whispered insults of such men as Casca, of the Tenth Ward, and other hire- lings of the disappointed candidate, hailing mostly from the Eleventh and Thirteenth and other outside districts, who were overheard speaking ironically and contemptuously of Mr. Cæsar's conduct upon that occasion. "We are further informed that there are many among us who think they are justified in believing that the assassination of Julius Cæsar was a put-up thing-a cut-and-dried arrangement, hatched by Marcus Brutus and a lot of his hired roughs, and carried out only too faithfully according to the programme. Whether there be good grounds for this suspicion or not, we leave to the people to judge for themselves, only asking that they will read the following account of the sad occurrence carefully and dis- passionately before they render that judgement. “The Senate was already in session, and Cæsar was coming down the street towards the capitol, conversing with some personal friends, and followed as usual by a large number of citizens. Just as he was passing in front of Demothenes and Thucydides' drug- store, he was observing casually to a gentleman, who, our informant thinks, is a fortune-teller, that the Ides of March were come. The reply was, 'Yes, they are come, but not gone yet.' At this moment Artemidorus stepped up and passed the time of day, and asked Cæsar to read a schedule or a tract or something of the kind, which he had brought for his perusal. Mr. Decius Brutus also said something about an 'humble suit' which he wanted read. Arte- midorus begged that attention might be paid to his first, because it was of personal consequence to Cæsar. The latter replied that what concerned himself should be read last, or words to that effect. Artemidorus begged and beseeched him to read the paper instantly.* *Mark that it is hinted by William Shakespeare, who saw the beginning and the end of the unfortunate affray, that this "schedule" was simply a note dis. covering to Cæsar that a plot was brewing to take his life. THE KILLING OF JULIUS CESAR "LOCALIZED" 165 ! However, Cæsar shook him off, and refused to read any petition in the street. He then entered the capitol, and the crowd followed him. “About this time the following conversation was overheard, and we consider that, taken in connection with the events which succeeded it, it bears an appalling significance: Mr. Papilius Lena remarked to George W. Cassius (commonly known as the 'Nobby Boy of the Third Ward'), a bruiser in the pay of the Opposition, that he hoped his enterprise to-day might thrive; and when Cassius asked 'What enterprise?' he only closed his left eye temporarily and said with simulated indifference, 'Fare you well,' and sauntered towards Cæsar. Marcus Brutus who is suspected of being the ringleader of the band that killed Cæsar, asked what it was that Lena had said. Cassius told him, and added in a low tone, 'I fear our pur- pose is discovered. "Brutus told his wretched accomplice to keep his eye on Lena, and a moment after Cassius urged that lean and hungry vagrant, Casca whose reputation here is none of the best, to be sudden for he feared prevention. He then turned to Brutus, apparently much excited, and asked what should be done, and swore that either he or Cæsar should never turn back-he would kill himself first. At this time Cæsar was talking to some of the back-country members about the approaching fall elections, and paying little attention to what was going on around him. Billy Trebonius got into con- versation with the people's friend and Cæsar's-Mark Antony- and under some pretence or other got him away, and Brutus, Decius, Casca, Cinna, Metellus Cimber, and others of the gang of imfamous desperadoes that infest Rome at present, closed around the doomed Cæsar. Then Metellus Cimber knelt down and begged that his brother might be recalled from banishment, but Cæsar rebuked him for his fawning conduct, and refused to grant his petition. Immediately, at Cimber's request, first Brutus and then Cassius begged for the return of the banished Publius; but Cæsar still refused. He said he could not be moved; that he was as fixed 166 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES as the North Star, and proceeded to speak in the most compli- mentary terins of the firmness of that star, and its steady charac- ter. Then he said he was like it, and he believed he was the only man in the country that was; therefore since he was 'constant' that Cimber should be banished, he was also 'constant' that he should stay banished, and he'd be hanged if he didn't keep him so! Instantly seizing upon this shallow pretext for a fight, Casca sprang at Cæsar and struck him with a dirk, Cæsar grabbing him by the arm with his right hand, and launching a blow straight from the shoulder with his left, that sent the reptile bleeding to the earth. He then backed up against Pompey's statue, and squared himself to receive his assailants. Cassius and Cimber and Cinna rushed upon him with their daggers drawn, and the former suc- ceeded in inflicting a wound upon his body; but before he could strike again, and before either of the others could strike at all, Cosar stretched the three miscreants at his feet with as many blows of his powerful fist. By this time the Senate was in an indescribable uproar; the throng of citizens in the lobbies had blockaded the doors in their frantic efforts to escape from the building, the sergeant-at-arms and his assistants were struggling with the assassins, venerable senators had cast aside their encumbering robes, and were leaping over benches and flying down the aisles in wild confusion toward the shelter of the committee-rooms, and a thousand voices were shouting 'Po-lice! Po-lice!' in discordant tones that rose above the frightful din like shrieking winds above the roaring of a tempest. And amid it all, great Cæsar stood with his back against the statue, like a lion at bay, and fought his assailants weaponless and hand to hand, with the defiant bearing and the unwavering courage which he had shown before on many a bloody field. Billy Trebonius and Caius Legarius struck him with their daggers and fell, as their brother conspirators before them had fallen. But at last, when Cæsar saw his old friend Brutus step forward armed with a murderous knife, it is said he seemed utterly overpowered with grief and amazement, and dropping his THE KILLING OF JULIUS CÆSAR“LOCALIZED” 167 1 1 invincible left arm by his side, he hid his face in the folds of his mantle and received the treacherous blow without an effort to stay the hand that gave it. He only said, 'Et tu, Brute?' and fell life- less, on the marble pavement. "We learn that the coat deceased had on when he was killed was the same he wore in his tent on the afternoon of the day he over- come the Nervii, and that when it was removed from the corpse it was found to be cut and gashed in no less than seven different places. There was nothing in the pockets. It will be exhibited at the coroner's inquest, and will be damning proof of the fact of the killing. These latter facts may be relied on, as we get them from Mark Antony, whose position enables him to learn every item of news connected with the one subject of absorbing interest of to-day. “LATER.—While the coroner was summoning a jury, Mark Antony and other friends of the late Cæsar got hold of the body, and lugged it off to the Forum, and at last accounts Antony and Brutus were making speeches over it and raising such a row among the people that, as we go to press, the chief of police is satisfied there is going to be a riot, and is taking measures accordingly," MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES jad μ The Widow's Protest. NE of the saddest things that ever came under Ο my notice (said the banker's clerk) was there in Corning, during the war. Dan Murphy enlisted as a private, and fought very bravely. The boys all liked him, and when a wound by-and-by weakened him down till carrying a musket was too heavy work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a sutler. He made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for him. She was a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to keep money when she got it. She didn't waste a penny. On the contrary, she began to get miserly as her bank account grew. She grieved to part with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working life she had known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and without a dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering so again. Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their esteem and respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she would like to have him embalmed and sent home; when you know the usual custom was to 168 THE WIDOW'S PROTEST 169 dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then inform his friends what had become of him. Mrs. Murphy jumped to the conclusion that it would only cost three or four dollars to embalm her dead hus- band, and so she telegraphed "Yes." It was at the "wake" that the bill for embalming arrived and was presented to the widow. H She uttered a wild sad wail that pierced every heart, and said, "Sivinty-foive dollars for stooffin' Dan, blister their sowls! Did thim divils suppose I was goin' to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such expinsive curiassities!" The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES } Mr. Bloke's Item. UR esteemed friend, Mr. John William Bloke, of Virginia City, walked into the office where we are sub-editor at a late hour last night, with an expression of profound and heartfelt suffering upon his countenance, and sighing heavily, laid the follow- ing item reverently upon the desk, and walked slowly out again. He paused a moment at the door, and seemed struggling to command his feelings sufficiently to enable him to speak, and then, nodding his head towards his manuscript, ejaculated in a broken voice, "Friend of mine-oh! how sad!" and burst into tears. We were so moved at his distress that we did not think to call him back and endeavor to comfort him until he was gone, and it was too late. The paper had already gone to press, but knowing that our friend would consider the publication of this item important, and cherishing the hope that to print it would afford a melancholy satisfaction to his sorrow- ing heart, we stopped the press at once and inserted it in our columns:- ↑ 170 MR. BLOKE'S ITEM 171 DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.-Last evening, about six o'clock, as Mr. William Schuyler, an old and respectable citizen of South Park, was leaving his residence to go down town, as has been his usual custom for many years with the exception only of a short interval in the spring of 1850, during which he was confined to his bed by injuries received in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly placing himself directly in its wake and throwing up his hands and shouting, which if he had done so even a single moment sooner, must have inevitably frightened the animal still more instead of checking its speed, although disastrous enough to himself as it was, and rendered more melancholy and distressing by reason of the presence of his wife's mother, who was there and saw the sad occurrence, notwithstanding it is at least likely, though not necessarily so, that she should be reconnoitering in another direction when incidents occur, not being vivacious and on the lookout, as a general thing, buteven the reverse, as her own mother is said to have stated, who is no more, but died in the full hope of a glorious resurrection, upwards of three years ago, aged eighty-six, being a Christian woman and without guile, as it were, or property, in consequence of the fire of 1849, which destroyed every single thing she had in the world. But such is life. Let us all take warning by this solemn occurrence, and let us endeavor so to conduct ourselves that when we come to die we can do it. Let us place our hands upon our heart, and say with earnestness and sincerity that from this day forth we will beware of the intoxicat- ing bowl.-First Edition of the Californian. The head editor has been in here raising the mis- chief, and tearing his hair and kicking the furniture about, and abusing me like a pick-pocket. He says every time he leaves me in charge of the paper for half an hour, I get imposed upon by the first infant or the first idiot that comes along. And he says that 172 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES that distressing item of Mr. Bloke's is nothing but a lot of distressing bosh, and has no point to it, and no sense in it, and no information in it, and that there was no sort of necessity for stopping the press to publish it. Now all this comes of being good-hearted. If I had been as unaccommodating and unsympathetic as some people, I would have told Mr. Bloke that I wouldn't receive his communication at such a late hour; but no, his snuffling distress touched my heart, and I jumped at the chance of doing something to modify his misery. I never read his item to see whether there was anything wrong about it, but hastily wrote the few lines which preceded it, and sent it to the printers. And what has my kindness done for me? It has done nothing but bring down upon me a storm of abuse and ornamental blasphemy. Now I will read that item myself, and see if there is any foundation for all this fuss. And if there is, the author of it shall hear from me. * * * Y * I have read it, and I am bound to admit that it seems a little mixed at a first glance. However, I will peruse it once more. * * * I have read it again, and it does really seem a good deal more mixed than ever. * * * * * * * I have read it over five times, but if I can get at the meaning of it, I wish I may get my just deserts. It MR. BLOKE'S ITEM 173 won't bear analysis. There are things about it which I cannot understand at all. It don't say whatever became of William Schuyler. It just says enough about him to get one interested in his career, and then drops him. Who is William Schuyler, anyhow, and what part of South Park did he live in, and if he started down town at six o'clock, did he ever get there, and if he did, did anything happen to him? Is he the individual that met with the "distressing acci- dent?" Considering the elaborate circumstantiality of detail observable in the item, it seems to me that it ought to contain more information than it does. On the contrary, it is obscure-and not only obscure, but utterly incomprehensible. Was the breaking of Mr. Schuyler's leg, fifteen years ago, the "distressing accident" that plunged Mr. Bloke into unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up here at dead of night and stop our press to acquaint the world with the circumstance? Or did the "distressing accident" consist in the destruction of Schuyler's mother-in- law's property in early times? Or did it consist in the death of that person herself three years ago? (albeit it does not appear that she died by accident.) In a word, what did that "distressing accident” con- sist in? What did that drivelling ass of a Schuyler stand in the wake of a runaway horse for, with his shouting and gesticulating, if he wanted to stop him? And how the mischief could he get run over by a horse that had already passed beyond him? And what are • 174 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES we to take "warning" by? And how is this extraordi- nary chapter of incomprehensibilities going to be a "lesson" to us? And, above all, what has the intox- icating "bowl" got to do with it, anyhow? It is not stated that Schuyler drank, or that his wife drank, or that his mother-in-law drank, or that the horse drank-wherefore, then, the reference to the intoxi- cating bowl? It does seem to me that if Mr. Bloke had let the intoxicating bowl alone himself, he never would have got into so much trouble about this exasperating imaginary accident. I have read this absurd item over and over again, with all its insin- uating plausibilty, until my head swims; but I can make neither head nor tail of it. There certainly seems to have been an accident of some kind or other, but it is impossible to determine what the nat- ure of it was, or who was the sufferer by it. I do not like to do it, but I feel compelled to request that the next time anything happens to one of Mr. Bloke's friends, he will append such explanatory notes to his account of it as will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it was and whom it happened to. I had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another such production as the above. ? } A CURIOUS DREAM À Curious Dream. CONTAINING A MORAL. N IGHT before last I had a singular dream. 1 seemed to be sitting on a door-step (in no par- ticular city perhaps), ruminating, and the time of night appeared to be about twelve or one o'clock. The weather was balmy and delicious. There was no human sound in the air, not even a footstep. There was no sound of any kind to emphasize the dead stillness, except the occasional hollow barking of a dog in the distance and the fainter answer of a further dog. Presently up the street I heard a bony clack-clacking, and guessed it was the castanets of a serenading party. In a minute more a tall skeleton, hooded, and half-clad in a tattered and mouldy shroud, whose shreds were flapping about the ribby lattice-work of its person swung by me with a stately stride, and disappeared in the grey gloom of the starlight. It had a broken and worm-eaten coffin on its shoulder and a bundle of something in its hand. I knew what the clack-clacking was then; it was this party's joints working together, and his elbows knocking against his sides as he walked. I may say I was surprised. Before I could collect my thoughts and t 175 176 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES enter upon any speculations as to what this appari- tion might portend, I heard another one coming-for I recognized his clack-clack. He had two-thirds of a coffin on his shoulder, and some foot- and head- boards under his arm. I mightily wanted to peer under his hood and speak to him, but when he turned and smiled upon me with his cavernous sockets and his projecting grin as he went by, I thought I would not detain him. He was hardly gone when I heard the clacking again, and another one issued from the hadowy half-light. This one was bending under a heavy gravestone, and dragging a shabby coffin after him by a string. When he got to me he gave me a steady look for a moment or two, and then rounded to and backed up to me, saying: "Ease this down for a fellow, will you?" I eased the gravestone down till it rested on the ground, and in doing so noticed that it bore the name of "John Baxter Copmanhurst," with "May, 1839," as the date of his death. Deceased sat wearily down by me, and wiped his os front is with his major maxillary-chiefly from former habit I judged, for I could not see that he brought away any perspiration. "It is too bad, too bad," said he, drawing the rem- nant of the shroud about him and leaning his jaw pensively on his hand. Then he put his left foot up on his knee and fell to scratching his ankle bone absently with a rusty nail which he got out of his coffin. M A CURIOUS DREAM 177 : 1 "What is too bad, friend?” "Oh, everything, everything. I almost wish I never had died." "You surprise me. Why do you say this? Has anything gone wrong? What is the matter?" "Matter! Look at this shroud-rags. Look at 12 178 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES * this gravestone, all battered up. Look at that dis- graceful old coffin. All a man's property going to ruin and destruction before his eyes, and ask him if anything is wrong? Fire and brimstone!" "Calm yourself, calm yourself," I said. "It is too bad-it is certainly too bad, but then I had not sup- posed that you would much mind such matters, situ- ated as you are. "" "Well, my dear sir, I do mind them. My pride is hurt, and my comfort is impaired-destroyed, I might say. I will state my case-I will put it to you in such a way that you can comprehend it, if you will let me," said the poor skeleton, tilting the hood of his shroud back, as if he were clearing for action, and · thus unconsciously giving himself a jaunty and festive air very much at variance with the grave character of his position in life-so to speak-and in prominent contrast with his distressful mood. "Proceed," said I. "I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here, in this street-there, now, I just expected that cartilage would let go!-third rib from the bottom, friend, hitch the end of it to my spine with a string, if you have got such a thing about you, though a bit of silver wire is a deal pleasanter, and more durable and becoming, if one keeps it polished -to think of shredding out and going to pieces in this way, just on account of the indifference and neglect of one's posterity!"-and the poor ghost grated his A CURIOUS DREAM 179 teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a shiver— for the effect is mightily increased by the absence of muffling flesh and cuticle. "I reside in that old grave- yard, and have for these thirty years; and I tell you things have changed since I first laid this old tired frame there, and turned over, and stretched out for a long sleep, with a delicious sense upon me of being done with bother, and grief, and anxiety, and doubt, and fear, for ever and ever, and listening with com- fortable and increasing satisfaction to the sexton's work, from the startling clatter of his first spadeful on my coffin till it dulled away to the faint patting that shaped the roof of my new home—delicious! My! I wish you could try it to-night!" and out of my reverie deceased fetched me with a rattling slap with a bony hand. "Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there, and was happy. For it was out in the country, then -out in the breezy, flowery, grand old woods, and the lazy winds gossiped with the leaves, and the squirrels capered over us and around us, and the creeping things visited us, and the birds filled the tranquil solitude with music. Ah, it was worth ten years of a man's life to be dead then! Everything was pleasant. I was in a good neighborhood, for all the dead people that lived near me belonged to the best families in the city. Our posterity appeared to think the world of us. They kept our graves in the very best condition; the fences were always in fault- 180 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES less repair, head-boards were kept painted or white- washed, and were replaced with new ones as soon as they began to look rusty or decayed; monuments were kept upright, railings intact and bright, the rosebushes and shrubbery trimmed, trained, and free from blemish, the walks clean and smooth and gravelled. But that day is gone by. Our descendants have forgotten us. My grandson lives in a stately house built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep in a neglected grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them nests withal! I and friends that lie with me founded and secured the prosperity of this fine city, and the stately bantling of our loves leaves us to rotin a dilapidated cemetery which neighbors curse and strangers scoff at. See the difference between the old time and this -for instance: Our graves are all caved in, now; our head-boards have rotted away and tumbled down; our railings reel this way and that, with one foot in the air, after a fashion of unseemly levity; our monu- ments lean wearily, and our gravestones bow their heads discouraged; there be no adornments any more -no roses, nor shrubs, nor gravelled walks, nor any- thing that is a comfort to the eye; and even the paintless old board fence that did make a show of holding us sacred from companionship with beasts and the defilement of heedless feet, has tottered till it overhangs the street, and only advertises the pres- ence of our dismal resting-place and invites yet more A CURIOUS DREAM 181 : derision to it. And now we cannot hide our poverty and tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has stretched its withering arms abroad and taken us in, and all that remains of the cheer of our old home is the cluster of lugubrious forest trees that stand, bored and weary of a eity life, with their feet in our coffins, looking into the hazy distance and wishing they were there. I tell you it is disgraceful! "You begin to comprehend-you begin to see how it is. While our descendants are living sumptuously on our money, right around us in the city, we have to fight hard to keep skull and bones together. Bless you, there isn't a grave in our cemetery that doesn't leak-not one. Every time it rains in the night we have to climb out and roost in the trees-and some- times we are wakened suddenly by the chilly water trickling down the back of our necks. Then I tell you there is a general heaving up of old graves and kicking over of old monuments, and scampering of old skeletons for the trees! Bless me, if you had gone along there some such nights after twelve you might have seen as many as fifteen of us roosting on one limb, with our joints rattling drearily and the wind wheezing through our ribs! Many a time we have perched there for three or four dreary hours, and then come down, stiff and chilled through and drowsy, and borrowed each other's skulls to bale out our graves with—if you will glance up in my mouth, now as I tilt my head back, you can see that my head- 182 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES piece is half full of old dry sediment-how top-heavy and stupid it makes me sometimes! Yes, sir, many a time if you had happened to come along just before the dawn you'd have caught us baling out the graves and hanging our shrouds on the fence to dry. Why, I had an elegant shroud stolen from there one morn- ing-think a party by the name of Smith took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder-I think so because the first time I ever saw him he hadn't anything on but a check-shirt, and the last time I saw him, which was at a social gathering in the new cemetery, he was the best dressed corpse in the com- pany-and it is a significant fact that he left when he saw me; and presently an old woman from here missed her coffin-she generally took it with her when she went anywhere, because she was liable to take cold and bring on the spasmodic rheumatism that origi- nally killed her if she exposed herself to the night air much. She was named Hotchkiss-Anna Matilda Hotchkiss you might know her? She has two upper front teeth, is tall, but a good deal inclined to stoop, one rib on the left side gone, has one shred of rusty hair hanging from the left side of her head, and one little tuft just above and a little forward of her right ear, has her under jaw wired on one side where it had worked loose, small bone of left forearm gone-lost in a fight-has a kind of swagger in her gait and a 'gallus' way of going with her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the air-has been pretty free and easy, and G A CURIOUS DREAM 183 is all damaged and battered up till she looks like a queen's-ware crate in ruins-maybe you have met her?" "God forbid!" I involuntarily ejaculated, for some- how I was not looking for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard. But I hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, "I simply meant I had not had the honor-for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a friend of yours. You were saying that you were robbed-and it was a shame, too—but it appears by what is left of the 1 184 + MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES shroud you have on that it was a costly one in its day. How did—" A most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features and shrivelled integuments of my guest's face, and I was beginning to grow uneasy and distressed, when he told me he was only working up a deep, sly smile, with a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired his present garment a ghost in a neighboring cemetery missed one. This reassured me, but I begged him to confine himself to speech thenceforth because his facial expression was uncertain. Even with the most elaborate care it was liable to miss fire. Smiling should especially be avoided. What he might honestly consider a shin- ing success was likely to strike me in a very different light. I said I liked to see a skeleton cheerful, even decorously playful, but I did not think smiling was a skeleton's best hold. "Yes, friend," said the poor skeleton, "the facts are just as I have given them to you. Two of these old graveyards-the one that I resided in and one further along-have been deliberately neglected by our de- scendants of to-day until there is no occupying them any longer. Aside from the osteological discomfort of it-and that is no light matter this rainy weather -the present state of things is ruinous to property. We have got to move or be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly destroyed. Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there A CURIOUS DREAM 185 isn't a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance-now that is an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box mounted on an express wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned, silver mounted burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots-I mean folks like the Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such. They are all about ruined. The most substantial people in our set, they were. And now look at them-utterly used up and poverty-stricken. One of the Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late bar-keeper for some fresh shavings to put under his head. I tell you it speaks volumes, for there is nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument. He loves to read the inscription. He comes after a while to believe what it says himself, and then you may see him sit- ting on the fence night after night enjoying it. Epi- taphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more. Now, I don't complain, but confidentially I do think it was a little shabby in my descendants to give me nothing but this old slab of a gravestone—and all the more that there isn't a compliment on it. It used to have 'GONE TO HIS JUST REWARD' on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by- 186 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES and-by I noticed that whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that and then he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and comfortable. So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools. But a dead man always takes a deal of pride in his monument. Yonder goes half-a-dozen of the Jarvises, now, with the family monument along. And Smithers and some hired spectres went by with him a while ago. Hello, Hig- gins, good-bye, old friend! That's Meredith Higgins -died in '44-belongs to our set in the cemetery-fine old family-great-grandmother was an Injun-I am on the most familiar terms with him-he didn't hear me was the reason he didn't answer me. And I am sorry, too, because I would have liked to introduce you. You would admire him. He is the most dis- jointed, sway-backed, and generally distorted old skeleton you ever saw, but he is full of fun. When he laughs it sounds like rasping two stones together, and he always starts it off with a cheery screech like raking a nail across a window-pane. Hey, Jones! That is old Columbus Jones-shroud cost four hun- dred dollars-entire trousseau, including monument, twenty-seven hundred. This was in the Spring of '26. It was enormous style for those days. Dead people came all the way from the Alleghanies to see his things-the party that occupied the grave next to mine remembers it well. Now do you see that indi- A CURIOUS DREAM 187 vidual going along with a piece of a head-board under his arm, one leg-bone below his knee gone, and not a thing in the world on? That is Barstow Dal- housie, and next to Columbus Jones he was the most sumptuously outfitted person that ever entered our cemetery. We are all leaving. We cannot tolerate the treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendants. They open new cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy. They mend the streets, but they never mend anything that is about us or belongs to us. Look at that coffin of mine—yet I tell you in its day it was a piece of furniture that would have attracted attention in any drawing-room in this city. You may have it if you want it-I can't afford to repair it. Put a new bottom in her, and part of a new top, and a bit of fresh lining along the left side, and you'll find her about as comfortable as any receptacle of her species you ever tried. No thanks-no, don't mention it-you have been civil to me, and I would give you all the property I have got before I would seem ungrateful. Now this winding- sheet is a kind of a sweet thing in its way, if you would like to. No? Well, just as you say, but I wished to be fair and liberal-there's nothing mean about me. Good-by, friend, I must be going. I may have a good way to go to-night-don't know. I only know one thing for certain, and that is, that I am on the emigrant trail, now, and I'll never sleep in that crazy old cemetery again. I will travel till I 188 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES find respectable quarters if I have to hoof it to New Jersey. All the boys are going. It was decided in public conclave, last night, to emigrate, and by the time the sun rises there won't be a bone left in our old habitations. Such cemeteries may suit my sur- viving friends, but they do not suit the remains that have the honor to make these remarks. My opinion is the general opinion. If you doubt it, go and see how the departing ghosts upset things before they started. They were almost riotous in their demon- strations of distaste. Hello, here are some of the Bledsoes, and if you will give me a lift with this tombstone I guess I will join company and jog along with them—mighty respectable old family, the Bled- soes, and used to always come out in six-horse hearses, and all that sort of thing fifty years ago when I walked these streets in daylight. Good-by, friend." And with his gravestone on his shoulder he joined the grisly procession, dragging his damaged coffin after him, for notwithstanding he pressed it upon me so earnestly, I utterly refused his hospitality. I sup- pose that for as much as two hours these sad out- casts went clacking by, laden with their dismal effects, and all that time I sat pitying them. One or two of the youngest and least dilapidated among them inquired about midnight trains on the railways, but the rest seemed unacquainted with that mode of travel, and merely asked about common public roads G A CURIOUS DREAM 189 to various towns and cities, some of which are not on the map now, and vanished from it and from the earth as much as thirty years ago, and some few of them never had existed anywhere but on maps, and private ones in real estate agencies at that. And they asked about the condition of the cemeteries in these towns and cities, and about the reputation the citizens bore as to reverence for the dead. This whole matter interested me deeply, and like- wise compelled my sympathy for these homeless ones. And it all seeming real, and I not knowing it was a dream, I mentioned to one shrouded wanderer an idea that had entered my head to publish an account of this curious and very sorrowful exodus, but said also that I could not describe it truthfully, and just as it occurred, without seeming to trifle with a grave subject and exhibit an irreverence for the dead that would shock and distress their surviving friends. But this bland and stately remnant of a former citizen leaned him far over my gate and whispered in my ear, and said:- "Do not let that disturb you. The community that can stand such graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can say about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them." At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with my ♡ 190 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES * head out of the bed and "sagging" downwards con- siderably-a position favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry. 1 NOTE.-The reader is assured that if the cemeteries in his town are kept in good order, this Dream is not levelled at his town at all, but is levelled partic- ularly and venomously at the next town, A TRUE STORY A True Story. REPEATED WORD FOR WORD AS I HEARD IT. IT T was summer, and twilight. We were sitting on the porch of the farm-house, on the summit of the hill, and "Aunt Rachel" was sitting respectfully be- low our level, on the steps,-for she was our servant, and colored. She was of mighty frame and stature; she was sixty years old, but her eye was undimmed and her strength unabated. She was a cheerful, hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to laugh than it is for a bird to sing. She was under fire, now, as usual when the day was done. That is to say, she was being chaffed without mercy, and was enjoying it. She would let off peal after peal of laughter, and then sit with her face in her hands and shake with throes of enjoyment which she could no longer get breath enough to express. At such a moment as this a thought occurred to me, and I said: "Aunt Rachel, how is it you've lived sixty years and never had any trouble?" She stopped quaking. She paused, and there was a moment of silence. She turned her face over her 191 192 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES shoulder toward me, and said, without even a smile in her voice:- "Misto C—, is you in 'arnest?” It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner and my speech, too. I said:- "Why, I thought-that is, I meant-why, you can't have had any trouble. I've never heard you sigh, and never seen your eye when there wasn't a laugh in it." She faced fairly around, now, and was full of earnestness. "Has I had any trouble? Misto C, I's gwine to tell you, den I leave it to you. I was bawn down 'mongst de slaves; I knows all 'bout slavery, 'case I ben one of 'em my own self. Well, sah, my ole man- dat's my husban'-he was lovin' an' kind to me, jist as kind as you is to yo' own wife. An' we had chil'en -seven chil'en-an' we loved den chil'en jist de same as you loves yo' chil'en. Dey was black, but de Lord can't make no chil'en so black but what dey mother loves 'em and wouldn't give 'em up, no, not for any- thing dat's in dis whole world. • "Well, sah, I was raised in ole Fo'ginny, but my mother she was raised in Maryland; an' my souls! she was turrible when she'd git started! My lan'! but she'd make de fur fly! When she'd git into dem tantrums, she always had one word dat she said. She'd straighten herse'f up an' put her fists in her hips an' say, 'I want you to understan' dat I wa’nt A TRUE STORY 193 bawn in the mash to be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chicken's, Iis!' 'Ca'se, you see, dats what folks dat's bawn in Maryland calls deyselves, an' dey's proud of it. Well, dat was her word. I don't ever forgit it, beca'se she said it so much, an' beca'se she said it one day when my little Henry tore his wris' awful, and most busted his head, right up at de top of his forehead, an' de niggers didn't fly aroun' fas' enough to 'tend to him. An' when dey talk' back at her, she up an' she says, 'Look-a-head!' she says, 'I want you niggers to understan' dat I wan't bawn in de mash to be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chickens, I is!' an' den she clar' dat kitchen an' bandage' up de chile herse'f. So I says dat word, too, when I's riled. "Well, bymeby my ole mistis say she's broke, an' she' got to sell all de niggers on de place. An' when I hear dat dey gwine to sell us all off at oction in Richmon', oh de good gracious! I know what dat mean!" Aunt Rachel had gradually risen, while she warmed to her subject, and now she towered above me, black against the stars. "Dey put chains on us an' put us on a stan' as high as dis po'ch,-twenty foot high,—an' all de peo- ple stood aroun', crowds an' crowds. An' dey'd come up dah an' look at us all roun', an' squeeze our arm, an' make us git up an' walk, an' den say, 'Dis one too ole,' or 'Dis one lame,' or 'Dis one don't A 18 194 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES 'mount to much.' An' dey sole my ole man, an' took him away, an' dey begin to sell my chil'en an' take dem away, an' I begin to cry; an' de man say, ‘Shet up yo' dam blubberin',' an' hit me on de mouf wid his han'. An' when delas' one was gone but my little Henry, I grab' him clost up to my breas' so, an' I ris up an' says, 'You shan't take him away,' I says; 'I'll kill de man dat tetches him!' I says. But my little Henry whisper an' say, 'I gwyne to run away, an' den I work an' buy yo' freedom.' Oh, bless de chile, he always so good! But dey got him—dey got him, de men did; but I took and tear de cl'es mos' off of 'em an' beat 'em over de head wid my chain; an' dey give it to me, too, but I didn't mind dat. "Well, dah was my ole man gone, an' all my chil'en, all my seven chil'en-an' six of 'em I hain't set eyes on ag'in to dis day, an' dat's twenty-two year ago las' Easter. De man dat bought me b'long' in New- bern, an' he took me dah. Well, bymeby de years roll on an' de waw come. My marster he was a Con- fedrit colonel, an' I was his family's cook. So when de Unions took dat town, dey all run away an' lef' me all by myse'f wid de other niggers in dat mons’us big house. So de big Union officers move in dah, an' dey ask me would I cook for dem. 'Lord bless you,' says I, 'dat's what I's for.' "Dey wa'nt no small-fry officers, mine you, dey was de biggest dey is; an' de way dey made dem sojers mosey roun'! De Gen'l he tole me to boss dat A TRUE STORY 195 : kitchen; an' he say, 'If anybody come meddlin' wid you, you jist make 'em walk chalk; don't you be afeared,' he say; 'you's 'mong frens, now.' "Well, I thinks to myse'f if my little Henry ever got a chance to run away, he'd make to de Norf, o'course. So one day I comes in dah whar de big officers was, in de parlor, an' I drops a kurtchy, so, an' I up an' tole 'em 'bout my Henry, dey a-listenin' to my troubles jist de same as if I was white folks; an' I says, 'What I come for is beca'se if he got away and got up Norf whar you gemmen comes from, you might 'a' seen him, maybe, an' could tell me so as I could fine him ag'in; he was very little, an' he had a sk-yar on his lef' wris', an' at de top of his forehead.' Den dey look mournful, an' de Gen'l say 'How long sence you los' him?' an' I say, "Thirteen year.' Den de Gen'l say, 'He wouldn't be little no mo' now-he's a man!' "I never thought o' dat befo'! He was only dat little feller to me, yit. I never thought 'bout him growin' up an' bein' big. But I see it den. None o' de gemmen had run acrost him, so dey couldn't do nothin' for me. But all dat time, do' I didn't know it, my Henry was run off to de Norf, years an' years, an' he was a barber, too, an' worked for hisse'f. An' bymeby, when de waw come' he ups an' he says, 'I's done barberin',' he says, 'I's gwyne to fine my ole mammy, less'n she's dead.' So he sole out an' went to whar dey was recruitin', an' hired hisse'f out to de colonel for his servant; an' den he went all froo de 196 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ¿ battles everywhar huntin' for his ole mammy; yes indeedy, he'd hire to fust one officer an' den another, tell he'd ransacked de whole Souf; but you see I didn't know nuffin 'bout dis. How was I gwyne to know it? "Well, one night we had a big sojer ball; de sojers dah at Newbern was always havin' balls an' carryin' on. Dey had 'em in my kitchen, heaps o' times, 'ca'se it was so big. Mine you, I was down on sich doin's; beca'se my place was wid de officers' an' it rasp me to have dem common sojers cavortin' roun' my kitchen like dat. But I alway' stood aroun' an' kep' things straight, I did; an' sometimes dey'd git my dander up, an' den I'd make 'em clar dat kitchen, mine I tell you! "Well, one night—it was a Friday night-dey comes a whole plattoon f'm a nigger ridgment dat was on guard at de house,-de house was head-quarters, you know,-an' den I was jista-bilin'! Mad? I was jist a-boomin'! I swelled aroun', an' swelled aroun'; I jist was a-itchin' for 'em to do somefin for to start me. An' dey was a-walzin' an' a-dancin'! my! but dey was havin' a time! an' I jist a-swellin' an' a-swellin' up! Pooty soon,' long comes sich a spruce young nigger a-sailin' down de room wid a yaller wench roun' de wais'; an' roun', an' roun' an' roun' dey went, enough to make a body drunk to look at 'em; an' when dey got abreas'o' me, dey went to kin' o' balancin' aroun' fust on one leg an' den on t'other, an' smilin' at my big red turban, an' makin' fun, an' ! A TRUE STORY 197 KK N I ups and says, ‘Git along wid you!-rubbage!' De young man's face kin' o' changed, all of a sudden, for 'bout a second, but den he went to smilin' ag'in, same as he was befo'. Well, 'bout dis time, in comes some niggers dat played music and b'long' to de ban', an' dey never could git along widout puttin' on airs. Bauer N.Y An' de very fust air dey put on dat night, I lit into 'em! Dey laughed, an' dat made me wuss. De res' o' de niggers got to laughin', an' den my soul alive but I was hot! My eye was jist a-blazin'! I jist straightened myself up, so-jist as I is now, plum to de ceilin', mos'.-an' I digs my firts into my hips, an' I says, ‘Look-a-heah!' I says, 'I want you niggers 198 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES to understan' dat I wa'nt bawn in de mash to be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chickens, I is!' an' den I see dat young man stan' a-starin' an' stiff, lookin' kin' o' up at de ceilin' like he fo'got somefin, an' couldn't 'member it no mo'. Well, I jist march' on dem niggers,-so, lookin' like a gen'l,—an' dey jist cave' away befo' me an' out at de do'. An' as dis young man was a-goin' out, I heah him say to another nigger, 'Jim,' he says, 'you go 'long an' tell de cap'n I be on han' 'bout eight o'clock in de mawnin'; dey's somefin on my mine,' he says; 'I don't sleep no' mo' dis night. You go 'long,' he says, ‘an' leave me by my own se'f.' "Dis was 'bout one o'clock in de mawnin'. Well, 'bout seven, I was up an' on han', gittin'de officers' breakfast. I was a-stoopin' down by de stove,-jist so, same as if yo' foot was de stove,―an' I'd opened de stove do' with my right han',-so, pushin' it back, jist as I pushes yo' foot,-an' I'd jist got de pan o' hot biscuits in my han' an' was 'bout to raise up, when I see a black face come aroun' under mine, an' de eyes a-lookin' up into mine, jist as I's a-lookin' up clost under yo' face now; an' I jist stopped right dah, an' never budged! jist gazed, an' gazed, so; an' de pan begin to tremble, an' all of a sudden I knowed! De pan drop' on de flo' an' I grab his lef' han' an' shove back his sleeve,-jist so, as I's doin' to you,—an’ den I goes for his forehead and push de hair back, so, an' 'Boy!' I says, 'if you an't my Henry, what is you 1 A TRUE STORY 199 doin' wid dis welt on yo' wris' an' dat sk-yar on yo' forehead? De Lord God ob heaven be praise', I got my own ag'in !' "Oh, no, Misto C, I hain't had no trouble. An' no joy!" MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES The Siamese Twins. I Do not wish to write of the personal habits of these strange creatures solely, but also of certain curious details of various kinds concerning them, which belonging only to their private life, have never crept into print. Knowing the Twins intimately. I feel that I am peculiarly well qualified for the task I have taken upon myself. The Siamese Twins are naturally tender and affec- tionate in disposition, and have clung to each other with singular fidelity throughout a long and eventful life. Even as children they were inseparable com- panions, and it was noticed that they always seemed to prefer each other's society to that of any other persons. They nearly always played together; and, so accustomed was their mother to this peculiarity, that, whenever both of them chanced to be lost, she usually only hunted for one of them-satisfied that when she found that one she would find his brother somewhere in the immediate neighborhood. And yet these creatures were ignorant and unlettered-barba- rians themselves and the offspring of barbarians, { 200 THE SIAMESE TWINS 201 : who knew not the light of philosophy and science, What a withering rebuke is this to our boasted civi- lization, with its quarrelings, its wranglings, and its separations of brothers! As men, the Twins have not always lived in perfect accord; but still there has always been a bond between them which made them unwilling to go away from each other and dwell apart. They have even occupied the same house, as a general thing, and it is believed that they have never failed to even sleep together on any night since they were born. How surely do the habits of a lifetime become second nature to us! The Twins always go to bed at the same time; but Chang usually gets up about an hour before his brother. By an understanding between themselves, Chang does all the indoor work and Eng runs all the errands. This is because Eng likes to go out; Chang's habits are sedentary. However, Chang always goes along. Eng is a Baptist, but Chang is a Roman Catholic; still, to please his brother, Chang consented to be baptized at the same time that Eng was, on condition that it should not "count." Dur- ing the War they were strong partizans, and both fought gallantly all through the great struggle-Eng on the Union side and Chang on the Confederate. They took each other prisoners at Seven Oaks, but the proofs of capture were so evenly balanced in favor of each, that a general army court had to be assem- bled to determine which one was properly the captor, who Mark Than -I would like to meet the poor fool dreams he has 10 the knowledge of which enables hver to boldly koht the words an author who would make him look like cow-ding. ہے 202 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ' and which the captive. The jury was unable to agree for a long time; but the vexed question was finally decided by agreeing to consider them both prisoners, and then exchanging them. At one time Chang was convicted of disobedience of orders and sentenced to ten days in the guard-house, but Eng, in spite of all arguments, felt obliged to share his imprisonment, notwithstanding he himself was en- tirely innocent; and so, to save the blameless brother from suffering, they had to discharge both from custody-the just reward of faithfulness. G Upon one occasion the brothers fell out about something, and Chang knocked Eng down, and then tripped and fell on him, whereupon both clinched and began to beat and gourge each other without mercy. The bystanders interferred, and tried to separate them, but they could not do it, and so allowed them to fight it out. In the end both were disabled, and were carried to the hospital on one and the same shutter. Their ancient habit of going always together had its drawbacks when they reached man's estate, and entered upon the luxury of courting. Both fell in love with the same girl. Each tried to steal clan- destine interviews with her, but at the critical moment the other would always turn up. By and by Eng saw, with distraction, that Chang had won the girl's affections; and, from that day forth, he had to bear with the agony of being a witness to all their dainty THE SIAMESE TWINS 203 龙 ​billing and cooing. But with a magnanimity that did him infinite credit, he succumbed to his fate, and gave countenance and encouragement to a state of things that bade fair to sunder his generous heart- strings. He sat from seven every evening until two in the morning, listening to the fond foolishness of the two lovers, and to the concussion of hundreds of squandered kisses-for the privilege of sharing only one of which he would have given his right hand. But he sat patiently, and waited, and gaped, and yawned, and stretched, and longed for two o'clock to come. And he took long walks with the lovers on moonlight evenings-sometimes traversing ten miles, notwithstanding he was usually suffering from rheu- matism. He is an inveterate smoker; but he could not smoke on these occasions, because the young lady was painfully sensitive to the smell of tobacco. Eng cordially wanted them married, and done with it; but although Chang often asked the momentous question, the young lady could not gather sufficient courage to answer it while Eng was by. However, on one occasion, after having walked some sixteen miles, and sat up till nearly daylight, Eng dropped asleep, from sheer exhaustion, and then the question was asked and answered. The lovers were married. All acquainted with the circumstance applauded the noble brother in-law. His unwavering faithfulness was the theme of every tongue. He had stayed by them all through their long and arduous courtship; 204 *** MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES and when at last they were married, he lifted his hands above their heads, and said with impressive unction, "Bless ye, my children I will never desert ye!" and he kept his word. Fidelity like this is all too rare in this cold world. By and by Eng fell in love with his sister-in-law's sister, and married her, and since that day they have all lived together, night and day, in an exceeding sociability which is touching and beautiful to behold, and is a scathing rebuke to our boasted civilization. The sympathy existing between these two brothers is so close and so refined that the feelings, the im- pulses, the emotions of the one are instantly expe- rienced by the other. When one is sick, the other is sick; when one feels pain, the other feels it; when one is angered, the other's temper takes fire. We have already seen with what happy facility they both fell in love with the same girl. Now, Chang is bitterly opposed to all forms of intemperance, on principle; but Eng is the reverse-for, while these men's feelings and emotion are so closely wedded, their reasoning faculties are unfettered; their thoughts are free. Chang belongs to the Good Templars and is a hard working, enthusiastic-supporter of all temperance reforms. But, to his bitter distress, every now and then Eng gets drunk. and, of course that makes Chang drunk too. This unfortunate thing has been a great sorrow to Chang, for it almost destroys his usefulness in his favorite field of effort. As sure as he ་ THE SIAMESE TWINS 205 is to head a great temperance procession Eng ranges, up alongside of him, prompt to the minute, and drunk as a lord; but yet no more dismally and hopelessly drunk than his brother, who has not tasted a drop. And so the two begin to hoot aud yell, and throw mud and bricks at the Good Templars; and of course they break up the procession. It would be manifestly wrong to punish Chang for what Eng does, and, therefore, the Good Templars accept the untoward situation, and suffer in silence and sorrow. They have officially and deliberately examined into the matter, and find Chang blameless. They have taken the two brothers and filled Chang full of warm water and sugar and Eng full of whiskey, and in twenty-five minutes it was not possible to tell which was the drunkest. Both were as drunk as loons-and on hot whiskey punches, by the smell of their breath. Yet all the while Chang's moral principles were un- sullied, his conscience clear; and so all just men were forced to confess that he was not morally, but only physically drunk. By every right and by every moral evidence the man was strictly sober; and, therefore, it caused his friends all the more anguish to see him shake hands with the pump, and try to wind his watch with his night-key. There is a moral in these solemn warnings-or, at least, a warning in these solemn morals; one or the other. No matter, it is somehow. Let us heed it; let us profit by it. 206 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES -1 I could say more of an instructive nature about these interesting beings, but let what I have written suffice. Having forgotten to mention it sooner, I will re- mark in conclusion, that the ages of the Siamese Twins are respectively fifty-one and fifty-three years. } SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON Speech at the Scottish Banquet in London. Α΄ T the anniversary festival of the Scottish Corpo- ration of London on Monday evening, in re- sponse to the toast of "The Ladies," MARK TWAIN replied. The following is his speech as reported in the London Observer:- K "I am proud, indeed, of the distinction of being chosen to re- spond to this especial toast, to "The Ladies,' or to the women if you please, for that is the preferable term, perhaps; it is certainly the older, and therefore the more entitled to reverence. (Laughter.) I have noticed that the Bible, with that plain, blunt honesty which is such a conspicuous characteristic of the Scriptures, is always particular to never refer to even the illustrious mother of all mankind herself as a 'lady,' but speaks of her as a woman. (Laughter.) It is odd, but you will find it is so. I am peculiarly proud of this honor, because I think that the toast to women is one which, by right and by every rule of gallantry, should take precedence of all others—of the army, of the navy, of even royalty itself-perhaps, though the latter is not necessary in this day and in this land, for the reason that, tacitly, you do drink a broad general health to all good women when you drink the health of the Queen of England and the Princess of Wales. (Loud cheers.) I have in mind a poem just now which is familiar to you all, familiar 207 208 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES 1 to everybody. And what an inspiration that was (and how in- stantly the present toast recalls the verses to all our minds) when the most noble, the most gracious, the purest, and sweetest of all poets says:- ""Woman! O woman! er Wom-' (Laughter.) However, you remember the lines; and you remem- ber how feelingly, how daintily, how almost imperceptibly the verses raise up before you, feature by feature, the ideal of a true and perfect woman; and how, as you contemplate the finished marvel, your homage grows into worship of the intellect that could create so fair a thing out of mere breath, mere words. And you call to mind now, as I speak, how the poet, with stern fidelity to the history of all humanity, delivers this beautiful child of his heart and his brain over to the trials and the sorrows that must come to all, sooner or later, that abide in the earth, and how the pathetic story culminates in that apostrophe—so wild, so regret- ful, so full of mournful retrospection. The lines run thus:— "'Alas!-alas!-a-alas! --Alas! — -a as !' -and so on. (Laughter.) I do not remember the rest; but, taken altogether, it seems to me that poem is the noblest tribute to woman that human genius has ever brought forth—(laughter)—and I feel that if I were to talk hours I could not do my great theme completer or more graceful justice than I have now done in simply quoting that poet's matchless words. (Renewed laughter.) The phases of the womanly nature are infinite in their variety. Take any type of woman, and you shall find in it something to respect, something to admire, something to love. And you shall find the whole joining you heart and hand. Who was more patriotic than Joan of Arc? Who was braver? Who has given us a grander Instance of self-sacrificing devotion? Ah! you remember, you remember well, what a throb of pain, what a great tidal wave of SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON 209 grief swept over us all when Joan of Arc fell at Waterloo. (Much laughter.) Who does not sorrow for the loss of Sappho, the sweet singer of Israel? (Laughter.) Who among us does not miss the gentle ministrations, the softening influences, the humble piety of Lucretia Borgia? (Laughter.) Who can join in the heartless libel that says woman is extravagant in dress when he can look back and call to mind our simple and lowly mother Eve arrayed in her modification of the Highland costume. (Roars of laughter.) Sir, women have been soldiers, women have been painters, women have been poets. As long as language lives the name of Cleopatra will live. And, not because she conquered George III.—(laughter) -but because she wrote those divine lines- "Let dogs delight to bark and bite, For God hath made them so.' (More laughter.) The story of the world is adorned with the names of illustrious ones of our own sex-some of them sons of St. Andrew, too-Scott, Bruce, Burns, the warrier Wallace, Ben Nevis -(laughter)—the gifted Ben Lomond, and the great new Scotch- man, Ben Disraeli.* (Great laughter.) Out of the great plains of history tower whole mountain ranges of sublime women-the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Semiramis, Sairey Gamp; the list is endless-(laughter)—but I will not call the mighty roll, the names rise up in your own memories at the mere suggestion, luminous with the glory of deeds that cannot die, hallowed by the loving worship of the good and the true of all epochs and all climes. (Cheers.) Suffice it for our pride and our honor that we in our day have added to it such names as those of Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale. (Cheers.) Woman is all that she should be-gentle, patient, long suffering, trustful, unselfish, full of gener- ous impulses. It is her blessed mission to comfort the sorrowing, *Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, at that time Prime Minister of England, had just been elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University, and had made a speech which gave rise to a world of discussion, 18 14 210 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES INILA plead for the erring, encourage the faint of purpose, succor the distressed, uplift the fallen, befriend the friendless-in a word, afford the healing of her sympathies and a home in her heart for all the bruised and persecuted children of misfortune that knock at its hospitable door. (Cheers.) And when I say, God bless her, there is none among us who has known the ennobling affection of a wife, or the steadfast devotion of a mother but in his heart will say, Amen!" (Loud and prolonged cheering.) & 2 A GHOST STORY A Ghost Story. I TOOK a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years, until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom. I was glad enough when I reached my room and locked out the mould and the darkness. A cheery fire was burning in the grate, and I sat down before it with a comforting sense of relief. For two hours I sat there, thinking of bygone times; recalling old scenes, and summoning half-forgotten faces out of the mists of the past; listening, in fancy, to voices that long ago grew silent for all time, and to once familiar songs that nobody sings now. And as my 211 212 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES reverie softened down to a sadder and sadder pathos, the shrieking of the winds outside softened to a wail, the angry beating of the rain against the panes diminished to a tranquil patter, and one by one the noises in the street subsided, until the hurrying foot- steps of the last belated straggler died away in the distance and left no sound behind. The fire had burned low. A sense of loneliness crept over me. I arose and undressed, moving on tiptoe about the room, doing stealthily what I had to do, as if I were environed by sleeping enemies whose slumbers it would be fatal to break. I covered up in bed, and lay listening to the rain and wind and the faint creaking of distant shutters, till they lulled me to sleep. I slept profoundly, but how long I do not know. All at once I found myself awake, and filled with a shuddering expectancy. All was still. All but my own heart-I could hear it beat. Presently the bed clothes began to slip away slowly toward the foot of the bed, as if some one were pulling them! I could not stir; I could not speak. Still the blankets slipped deliberately away, till my reast was uncovered. Then with a great effort I seized them and drew them over my head. I waited, listened, waited. Once more that steady pull began, and once more I lay torpid a century of dragging seconds till my breast was naked again. At last I roused my energies and snatched the covers back to their place and held them En LV A GĦOST STORY 213 with a strong grip. I waited. By and bye I felt a faint tug, and took a fresh grip. The tug strength- ened to a steady strain-it grew stronger and stronger. My hold parted, and for the third time the blankets slid away. I groaned. An answering groan came from the foot of the bed! Beaded drops of sweat stood upon my forehead. I was more dead than alive Presently I heard a heavy footstep in my room—the step of an elephant, it seemed to me— it was not like anything human. But it was moving from me-there was relief in that. I heard it approach the door-pass out without moving bolt or lock—and wander away among the dismal corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it passed-and then silence reigned once more. When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself, "This is a dream-simply a hideous dream." And so I lay thinking it over until I convinced myself that it was a dream, and then a comforting laugh relaxed my lips and I was happy again. I got up and struck a light; and when I found that the locks and bolts were just as I had left them, another soothing laugh welled in my heart and rippled from my lips. I took my pipe and lit it, and was just sitting down before the fire, when-down went the pipe out of my nerve- less fingers, the blood forsook my cheeks, and my placid breathing was cut short with a gasp! In the ashes on the hearth, side by side with my own bare footprint, was another, so vast that in comparison 214 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES mine was but an infant's! Then I had had a visitor, and the elephant tread was explained. I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear. I lay a long time, peering into the dark- ness, and listening. Then I heard a grating noise overhead, like the dragging of a heavy body across the floor; then the throwing down of the body, and the shaking of my windows in response to the con- cussion. In distant parts of the building I heard the muffled slamming of doors. I heard, at intervals, stealthy footsteps creeping in and out among the corridors, and up and down the stairs. Sometimes these noises approached my door, hesitated, and went away again. I heard the clanking of chains. faintly, in remote passages, and listened while the clanking grew nearer-while it wearily climbed the stairways, marking each move by the loose surplus. of chain that fell with an accented rattle upon each succeeding step as the goblin that bore it advanced. I heard muttered sentences; half-uttered screams that seemed smothered violently; and the swish of invisi ble garments, the rush of invisible wings. Then I be- came conscious that my chamber was invaded—that I was not alone. I heard sighs and breathings about my bed, and mysterious whisperings. Three little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceil- ing directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment, and then dropped-two of them upon my face and one upon the pillow. They spattered, liquidly, A GHOST STORY 215 and felt warm. Intuition told me they had turned to gouts of blood as they fell-I needed no light to satisfy myself of that. Then I saw pallid faces, dimly luminous, and white uplifted hands, floating bodiless in the air,-floating a moment and then disappearing. The whispering ceased, and the voices and the sounds, and a solemn stillness followed. I waited, and list- ened. I felt that I must have light, or die. I was weak with fear. I slowly raised myself toward a sit- ting posture, and my face came in contact with a clammy hand! All strength went from me, appar- ently, and I fell back like a stricken invalid. Then I heard the rustle of a garment-it seemed to pass to the door and go out. When everything was still once more, I crept out of bed, sick and feeble, and lit the gas with a hand that trembled as if it were aged with a hundred years. The light brought some little cheer to my spirits. I sat down and fell into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the ashes. By and bye its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up and the broad gas flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I heard that elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned. The tread reached my very door and paused-the light had dwindled to a sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air 216 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES fan my cheek, and presently was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me. I watched it with fasci- nated eyes. A pale glow stole over the Thing; gradually its cloudy folds took shape—an arm ap- peared, then legs, then a body, and last a great sad face looked out of the vapor. Stripped of its filmy housings, naked, muscular and comely, the majestic Cardiff Giant loomed above me! All my misery vanished-for a child might know that no harm could come with that benignant countenance. My cheerful spirits returned at once, and in sympathy with them the gas flamed up brightly again. Never a lonely outcast was so glad to wel- come company as I was to greet the friendly giant. I said: "Why, is it nobody but you! Do you know, I have been scared to death for the last two or three hours? I am most honestly glad to see you. I wish I had a chair -.Here, here, don't try to sit down in that thing!" But it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him, and down he went-I never saw a chair shivered so in my life. "Stop, stop, you'll ruin ev-" Too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved into its original elements. "Confound it, haven't you got any judgment at all? Do you want to ruin all the furniture on the place? Here, here, you petrified fool” S A GHOST STORY 217 But it was no use. Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed, and it was a melancholy ruin. "Now what sort of a way is that to do? First you come lumbering about the place bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry me to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume which would not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people except in a respectable theatre, and not even there if the nudity were of your sex, you repay me by wreeking all the furniture you can find to sit down on. And why will you? You damage yourself as much as you do me. You have broken off the end of your spinal column, and littered up the floor with chips off your hams till the place looks like a marble-yard. You ought to be ashamed of yourself—you are big enough to know better." "Well, I will not break any more furniture. But what am I to do? I have not had a chance to sit down for a century." And the tears came into his eyes. "Poor devil," I said, "I should not have been so harsh with you. And you are an orphan, too, no doubt. But sit down on the floor here-nothing else can stand your weight-and, besides, we cannot be sociable with you away up there above me; I want you down where I can perch on this high counting- house stool and gossip with you face to face." So he sat down on the floor, and lit a pipe which I J 218 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES gave him, threw one of my red blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sitz-bath on his head, helmet fashion, and made himself picturesque and comforta- ble. Then he crossed his ankles, while I renewed the fire, and exposed the flat, honey-combed bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth. www. wwwwww "What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your legs, that they are gouged up so?" "Infernal chilblains-I caught them clear up to the back of my head, roosting out there under Newell's farm. But I love the place; I love it as one loves his old home. There is no peace for me like the peace I : A GHOST STORY 219 feel when I am there." We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired, and spoke of it. "Tired?" he said. "Well I should think so. And now I will tell you all about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the Museum. I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again. Now what was the most natural thing for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it!-haunt the place where the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other spirits to help me. But it did no good, for nobody ever come to the museum at midnight. Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that perdition could furnish. Night after night we have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering, tramp- ing up and down stairs, till to tell you the truth I am almost worn out. But when I saw alight in your room to-night I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am tired out-entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope!" I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed: 220 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES 2 "This transcends everything! everything that ever did occur! Why you poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing-you have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself-the real Cardiff Giant is in Albany !* Confound it, don't you know your own remains?" I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation, overspread a countenance be- fore. The Petrified Man rose slowly to his feet, and said: "Honestly, is that true?" "As true as I am sitting here." He took the pipe from his mouth and laid it on the mantel, then stood irresolute a moment (uncon- sciously from old habit, thrusting his hands where his pantaloons pockets should have been, and medi- tatively dropping his chin on his breast,) and finally said: "Well-I never felt so absurd before. The Petrified Man has sold every body else, and now the mean fraud has ended by selling its own ghost! My son, if there is any charity left in your heart for a poor friendless phantom like me, don't let this get out. Think how you would feel if you had made such an ass of yourself." *A fact. The original fraud was ingeniously and fraud fully duplicated, and exhibited in New York as the "only genuine" Cardiff Giant, (to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real colossus,) at the very same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a museum in Albany. A GHOST STORY 221 I heard his stately tramp die away, step by step down the stairs and out into the deserted street, and felt sorry that he was gone, poor fellow—and sorrier still that he had carried off my red blanket, and my bath-tub. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Speech on Accident Insurance. DELIVERED IN HARTFORD, AT A DINNER TO CORNELIUS WALFORD, OF LONDON. G ENTLEMEN: I am glad indeed to assist in welcoming the distinguished guest of this occa- sion to a city whose fame as an insurance center has extended to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple band of brothers working sweetly hand in hand, the Colt's arms company making the de- struction of our race easy and convenient, our life insurance citizens paying for the victims when they pass away, Mr. Batterson perpetuating their mem- ory with his stately monuments, and our fire insur- ance comrades taking care of their hereafter. I am glad to assist in welcoming our guest-first, because he is an Englishman, and I owe a heavy debt of hos- pitality to certain of his fellow-countrymen; and secondly, because he is in sympathy with insurance and has been the means of making many other men cast their sympathies in the same direction. Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance line of business-especially acci- dent insurance. Ever since I have been a director in ܂ ܝ 222 SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE 223 12 an accident insurance company I have felt that I am a better man. Life has seemed more precious. Acci- dents have assumed a kindlier aspect. Distressing special providences have lost half their horror. I look upon a cripple, now, with affectionate interest— as an advertisement. Ido not seem to care for poetry any more. I do not care for politics-even agricul- ture does not excite me. But to me, now, there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable. There is nothing more beneficent than accident insurance. I have seen an entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon of a broken leg. I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in their eyes, to bless this benefi- cent institution. In all my experience of life, I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a freshly mutilated man's face when he feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right. And I have seen nothing so sad as the look that came into another splintered customer's face, when he found he couldn't collect on a wooden leg./ I will remark here, by way of advertisement, that that noble charity which we have named the HART- FORD ACCIDENT INSURANCE COMPANY,* is an institution which is peculiarly to be depended upon. A man is bound to prosper who gives it his custom. No man can take out a policy in it and not get crippled before *The speaker is a director of the company named. 224 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES 5 A. the year is out. Now there was one indigent man who had been disappointed so often with other com- panies that he had grown disheartened, his appetite left him, he ceased to smile-said life was but a weariness. Three weeks ago I got him to insure with us, and now he is the brightest, happiest spirit in the land—has a good steady income and a stylish suit of new bandages every day and travels around on a shutter. I will say, in conclusion, that my share of the wel- come to our guest is none the less hearty because I talk so much nonsense, and I know that I can say the same for the rest of the speakers. سی JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK John Chinaman in New York. A SI passed along by one of those monster Amer- ican tea-stores in New York, I found a China- man sitting before it acting in the capacity of a sign. Everybody that passed by gave him a steady stare as long as their heads would twist over their shoul- ders without dislocating their necks, and a group had stopped to stare deliberately. Is it not a shame that we, who prate so much about civilization and humanity, are content to degrade a fellow-being to such an office as this? Is it not time for reflection when we find ourselves willing to see in such a being, matter for frivolous curiosity instead of regret and grave reflection? Here was a poor creature whom hard fortune had exiled from his nat- ural home beyond the seas, and whose troubles ought to have touched these idle strangers that thronged about him; but did it? Apparently not. Men calling themselves the superior race, the race of culture and of gentle blood, scanned his quaint Chinese hat, with peaked roof and ball on top, and his long queue dangling down his back; his short silken blouse, 15 225 226 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES curiously frogged and figured (and, like the rest of his raiment, rusty, dilapidated, and awkwardly put on); his blue cotton, tight-legged pants, tied close around the ankles; and his clumsy blunt-toed shoes with thick cork soles; and having so scanned him from head to foot, cracked some unseemly joke about his outlandish attire or his melancholy face, and passed on. In my heart I pitied the friendless Mongol. I wondered what was passing behind his sad face, and what distant scene his vacant eye was dreaming of. Were his thoughts with his heart, ten thousand miles away, beyond the billowy wastes of the Pacific? among the rice-fields and the plumy palms of China? under the shadows of remembered mountain-peaks, or in groves of bloomy shrubs and strange forest- trees unknown to climes like ours? And now and then, rippling among his visions and his dreams, did he hear familiar laughter and half-forgotten voices, and did he catch fitful glimpses of the friendly faces of a bygone time? A cruel fate it is, I said, that is befallen this bronzed wanderer. In order that the group of idlers might be touched at least by the words of the poor fellow, since the appeal of his pauper dress and his dreary exile was lost upon them, I touched him on the shoulder and said- K "Cheer up-don't be down-hearted. It is not Amer- ica that treats you in this way, it is merely one citizen, whose greed of gain has eaten the humanity out of his heart. America has a broader hospitality JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK 227 for the exiled and oppressed. America and Americans are always ready to help the unfortunate. Money shall be raised-you shall go back to China—you shall see your friends again. What wages do they pay you here?" "Divil a cint but four dollars a week and find meself; but it's aisy, barrin the troublesome furrin clothes that's so expinsive.' The exile remains at his post. The New York tea- merchants who need picturesque signs are not likely to run out of Chinamen. "" i MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES How I Edited an Agricultural Paper. I DID not take temporary editorship of an agri- cultural paper without misgivings. Neither would a landsman take command of a ship without mis- givings. But I was in circumstances that made the salary an object. The regular editor of the paper was going off for a holiday, and I accepted the terms he offered, and took his place. The sensation of being at work again was luxurious, and I wrought all the week with unflagging pleasure. We went to press, and I waited a day with some solicitude to see whether my effort was going to attract any notice. As I left the office, toward sun- down, a group of men and boys at the foot of the stairs dispersed with one impulse, and gave me pas- sage-way, and I heard one or two of them say: "That's him!" I was naturally pleased by this inci- dent. The next morning I found a similar group at the foot of the stairs, and scattering couples and individuals standing here and there in the street, and over the way, watching me with interest. The group 228 HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER 229 separated and fell back as I approached, and I heard a man say, “Look at his eye!" I pretended not to observe the notice I was attracting, but secretly I was pleased with it, and was purposing to write an account of it to my aunt. I went up the short flight of stairs, and heard cheery voices and a ringing laugh as I drew near the door, which I opened, and caught a glimpse of two young rural-looking men, whose faces blanched and lengthened when they saw me, and then they both plunged through the window with a great crash. I was surprised. In about half an hour an old gentleman, with a flowing beard and a fine but rather austere face, entered, and sat down at my invitation. He seemed to have something on his mind. He took off his hat and set it on the floor, and got out of it a red silk handkerchief and a copy of our paper. He put the paper on his lap, and while he polished his spectacles with his handkerchief, he said, "Are you the new editor?" I said I was. "Have you ever edited an agricultural paper be- fore?" "No," I said; "this is my first attempt." "Very likely. Have you had any experience in agriculture practically?" "No; I believe I have not." "Some instinct told me so," said the old gentle- man, putting on his spectacles, and looking over 230 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES * them at me with asperity, while he folded his paper ~into a convenient shape. "I wish to read you what must have made me have that instinct. It was this editorial. Listen, and see if it was you that wrote it:- (C "Turnips should never be pulled, it injures them. It is much better to send a boy up and let him shake the tree.' "Now, what do you think of that?-for I really suppose you wrote it?” "Think of it? Why, I think it is good. I think it is sense. I have no doubt that every year millions and millions of bushels of turnips are spoiled in this township alone by being pulled in a half-ripe condi- tion, when, if they had sent a boy up to shake the "" tree "Shake your grandmother! Turnips don't grow on trees!" "Oh, they don't, don't they? Well, who said they did? The language was intended to be figurative, wholly figurative. Anybody that knows anything will know that I meant that the boy should shake the vine." Then this old person got up and tore his paper all into small shreds, and stamped on them, and broke several things with his cane, and said I did not know as much as a cow; and then went out and banged the door after him, and, in short, acted in such a way that I fancied he was displeased about something. But not knowing what the trouble was, I could not be any help to him. "f HOW 1 EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER 231 Pretty soon after this a long cadaverous creature, with lanky locks hanging down to his shoulders, and a week's stubble bristling from the hills and valleys of his face, darted within the door, and halted, motion- less, with finger on lip, and head and body bent in listening attitude. No sound was heard. Still he listened. No sound. Then he turned the key in the door, and came elaborately tiptoeing toward me till he was within long reaching distance of me, when he stopped, and after scanning my face with intense interest for a while, drew a folded copy of our paper from his bosom, and said- Jadi "There, you wrote that. Read it to me-quick? Relieve me. I suffer." I read as follows; and as the sentences fell from my lips I could see the relief come, I could see the drawn muscles relax, and the anxiety go out of the face, and rest and peace steal over the features like the merci- ful moonlight over a desolate landscape: "The guano is a fine bird, but great care is necessary in rear- ing it. It should not be imported earlier than June or later than September. In the winter it should be kept in a warm place, where it can hatch out its young. "It is evident that we are to have a backward season for grain. Therefore it will be well for the farmer to begin setting out his cornstalks and planting his buckwheat cakes in July instead of August. "Concerning the pumpkin.-This berry is a favorite with the natives of the interior of New England, who prefer it to the goose- berry for the making of fruit-cake, and who likewise give it the : 232 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES + preference over the raspberry for feeding cows, as being more fill- ing and fully as satisfying. The pumpkin is the only esculent of the orange family that will thrive in the North, except the gourd and one or two varieties of the squash. But the custom of plant- ing it in the front yard with the shrubbery is fast going out of vogue, for it is now generally conceded that the pumpkin as a shade tree is a failure. "Now, as the warm weather approaches, and the ganders begin to spawn- "" The excited listener sprang toward me to shake hands, and said- . “There there—that will do. I know I am all right now, because you have read it just as I did, word for word. But, stranger, when I first read it this morn- ing, I said to myself, I never, never believed it before, notwithstanding my friends kept me under watch so strict, but now I believe I am crazy; and with that I fetched a howl that you might have heard two miles, and started out to kill somebody-because, you know, I knew it would come to that sooner or later, and so I might as well begin. I read one of them paragraphs over again, so as to be certain, and then I burned my house down and started. I have crip- pled several people, and have got one fellow up a tree, where I can get him if I want him. But I thought I would call in here as I passed along and make the thing perfectly certain; and now it is certain, and I tell you it is lucky for the chap that is in the tree. I should have killed him, sure, as I went back. Good- bye, sir, good-bye; you have taken a great load off { 1 HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER 233 my mind. My reason has stood the strain of one of your agricultural articles, and I know that nothing can ever unseat it now. Good-bye, sir." I felt a little uncomfortable about the cripplings and arsons this person had been entertaining himself with, for I could not help feeling remotely accessory to them. But these thoughts were quickly banished, for the regular editor walked in! [I thought to my- self, now if you had gone to Egypt as I recommended you to, I might have had a chance to get my hand in; but you wouldn't do it, and here you are. I sort of expected you.] The editor was looking sad and perplexed and de- jected. He surveyed the wreck which that old rioter and these two young farmers had made, and then said, "This is a sad business-a very sad business. There is the mucilage-bottle broken, and six panes of glass, and a spittoon and two candlesticks. But that is not the worst. The reputation of the paper is injured—and permanently, I fear. True, there never was such a call for the paper before, and it never sold such a large edition or soared to such celebrity;—but does one want to be famous for lunacy, and prosper upon the infirmities of his mind? My friend, as I am an honest man, the street out here is full of people, and others are roosting on the fences, waiting to get a glimpse of you, because they think you crazy. And well they might after reading your editorials. They 234 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES are a disgrace to journalism. Why, what put it into your head that you could edit a paper of this nature? You do not seem to know the first rudiments of agriculture. You speak of a furrow and a harrow as being the same thing; you talk of the moulting sea- son for cows; and you recommend the domestication of the pole-cat on account of its playfulness and its excellence as a ratter! Your remark that clams will lie quiet if music be played to them was superfluous— entirely superfluous. Nothing disturbs clams. Clams always lie quiet. Clams care nothing whatever about music. Ah, heavens and earth, friend! if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day. I never saw anything like it. Your observation that the horse-chestnut as an arti- cle of commerce is steadily gaining in favor is simply calculated to destroy this journal. I want you to throw up your situation and go. I want no more holiday-I could not enjoy it if I had it. Certainly not with you in my chair. I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to recommend next. It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your discussing oyster-beds under the head of 'Landscape Gardening.' I want you to go. Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday. Oh! why didn't you tell me you didn't know any- thing about agriculture?" "Tell you, you cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of f HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER ICULTURAL 235 a cauliflower? It's the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man's having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper. You turnip! Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war- whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a foot race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write the temper- ance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave. Who edit the agricultural papers, you―yam? Men, as a general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow-covered novel line, sensa- tion-drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poorhouse. You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the 236 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows if I had been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impu- dent instead of diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold selfish world. I take my leave, sir. Since I have been treated as you have treated me, I am perfectly willing to go. But I have done my duty. I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it. I said I could make your paper of interest to all classes-and I have. I said I could run your circulation up to twenty thousand copies, and if I had had two more weeks I'd have done it. And I'd have given you the best class of readers that ever an agricultural paper had-not a farmer in it, nor a solitary individual who could tell a water-melon tree from a peach-vine to save his life. You are the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant. Adios." I then left. THE PETRIFIED MAN The Petrified Man. NOW OW, to show how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly missing one's mark, I will here set down two expe- riences of my own in this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about extraordinary petrifications and other natural marvels. One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or two glorified discoveries of this kind. The mania was becoming a little ridic- ulous. I was a bran-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man. I had had a temporary falling out with Mr. —, the new coroner and justice of the peace of Humboldt, 2 237 238 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES and thought I might as well touch him up a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine pleasure with business. So I told, in patient belief-compelling detail, all about the finding of a petrified man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a hundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail, from where lived); how all the savants of the пей CON.X.. immediate neighborhood had been to examine it (it) was notorious that there was not a living creature within fifty miles of there, except a few starving In- dians, some crippled grasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get away); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man THE PETRIFIED MAN 239 to have been in a state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with a seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that as soon as Mr. heard the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule, and posted off, with noble reverence for official duty, on that awful five days' journey, through alkali, sage-brush, peril of body, and imminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had been dead and turned to ever- lasting stone for more than three hundred years! And then, my hand being "in," so to speak, I went. on, with the same unflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that deceased came to his death from protracted exposure. This only moved me to higher flights of imagination, and I said that the jury, with that charity so characteristic of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were about to give the petrified man Christian burial, when they found that for ages a limestone sediment had been trickling down the face of the stone against which he was sit- ting, and this stuff had run under him and cemented him fast to the "bed-rock;" that the jury (they were all silver miners) canvassed the difficulty a moment, and then got out their powder and fuse, and pro- ceeded to drill a hole under him, in order to blast him from his position, when Mr. —, "with that delicacy so characteristic of him, forbade them, observing that it would be little less than sacrilege to do such a thing." From beginning to end the "Petrified Man" squib TY 24.0 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES • was a string of roaring absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretence of truth that even im- posed upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger of believing in my own fraud. But I really had no desire to deceive anybody, and no expectation of doing it. I depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle. Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make it obscure-and I did. I would describe the position of one foot, and then say his right thumb was against the side of his nose; then talk about his other foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right hand were spread apart; then talk about the back of his head a little, and return and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger; then ramble off about some- thing else, and by and by drift back again and remark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of the right. But I was too ingenious. I mixed it up rather too much; and so all that description of the attitude, as a key to the humbuggery of the article, was entirely lost, for nobody but me ever discovered and comprehended the peculiar and suggestive posi- tion of the petrified man's hands. As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my Petrified Man was a disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent good faith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business with, and bring de- rision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place NAA THE PETRIFIED MAN 241 1 in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced. I was so disappointed at the curious mis- carriage of my scheme, that at first I was angry, and did not like to think about it; but by and by, when the exchanges began to come in with the Petrified Man copied and guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction; and as my gentleman's field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges I saw that he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory, State after State, and land after land, till he swept the great globe and culmi- nated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London Lancet, my cup was full, and I said I was glad I had done it. I think that for about eleven months, as nearly as I can remember, Mr. 's daily mail-bag continued to be swollen by the addition of half a bushel of newspapers hailing from many climes with the Petrified Man in them, marked around with a prominent belt of ink. I sent them to him. I did it for spite, not for fun. He used to shovel them into his back yard and curse. And every day during those months the miners, his constituents (for miners never quit joking a person when they get started), would call on him and ask if he could tell them where they could get hold of a paper with the Petrified Man in it. He could have accommodated a continent with them. I hated in those days, and these things pacified me and pleased me. I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him with- out killing him. 16 K MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES I f Bad, My Bloody Massacre. THE other burlesque I have referred to was my fine satire upon the financial expedients of "cook- ing dividends," a thing which became shamefully frequent on the Pacific coast for a while. Once more, in my self-complacent simplicity, I felt that the time had arrived for me to rise up and be a reformer. I put this reformatory satire in the shape of a fearful "Massacre at Empire City." The San Francisco papers were making a great outcry about the iniquity of the Daney Silver-Mining Company, whose directors had declared a "cooked" or false dividend, for the purpose of increasing the value of their stock, so that they could sell out at a comfortable figure, and then scramble from under the tumbling concern. And while abusing the Daney, those papers did not forget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver stocks and invest in sound and safe San Francisco stocks, such as the Spring Valley Water Company, etc. But right at this unfortunate junction, behold the Spring Valley cooked a dividend too! And so, under the insidious mask of an invented "bloody massacre," I 242 .. 1 MY BLOODY MASSACRE 243 stole upon the public unawares with my scathing satire upon the dividend-cooking system. In about half a column of imaginary human carnage I told how a citizen had murdered his wife and nine children, and then committed suicide. And I said slyly, at the bottom, that the sudden madness of which this melancholy massacre was the result, had been brought about by his having allowed himself to be persuaded by the California papers to sell his sound and lucra- tive Nevada silver stocks, and buy into Spring Valley just in time to get cooked along with that company's fancy dividend, and sink every cent he had in the world. Ah, it was a deep, deep satire, and most ingeniously contrived. But I made the horrible details so care- fully and conscientiously interesting that the public devoured them greedily, and wholly overlooked the following distinctly-stated facts, to wit:-The mur- derer was perfectly well known to every creature in the land as a bachelor, and consequently he could not murder his wife and nine children; he murdered them "in his splendid dressed-stone mansion just in the edge of the great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick's," when even the very pickled oysters that came on our tables knew that there was not a "dressed-stone mansion" in all Nevada Territory; also that, so far from there being a "great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick's," there wasn't a solitary tree within fifteen miles of either place; and, 244 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES finally, it was patent and notorious that Empire City and Dutch Nick's were one and the same place, and contained only six houses anyhow, and conse- quently there could be no forest between them; and on top of all these absurdities I stated that this diabolical murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself that the reader ought to have seen would kill CARSON CITY SHADES Z v u v w u All Photo. Eur. Com an elephant in the twinkling of an eye, jumped on his horse and rode four miles, waving his wife's reeking scalp in the air, and thus performing entered Carson City with tremendous eclat, and dropped dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy and admiration of all beholders. y Ven = MY BLOODY MASSACRE 245 Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little satire created. It was the talk of the town, it was the talk of the Territory. Most of the citizens dropped gently into it at breakfast, and they never finished their meal. There was some- thing about those minutely faithful details that was a sufficing substitute for food. Few people that were able to read took food that morning. Dan and I (Dan was my reportorial associate) took our seats on either side of our customary table in the "Eagle Restaurant," and, as I unfolded the shred they used to call a napkin in that establishment, I saw at the next table two stalwart innocents with that sort of vegetable dandruff sprinkled about their clothing which were the sign and evidence that they were in from the Truckee with a load of hay. The one facing me had the morning paper folded to a long narrow strip, and I knew, without any telling, that that strip represented the column that contained my pleasant financial satire. From the way he was excitedly mumbling, I saw that the heedless son of a hay-mow was skipping with all his might, in order to get to the bloody details as quickly as possible; and so he was missing the guide-boards I had set up to warn him that the whole thing was a fraud. Pres- ently his eyes spread wide open, just as his jaws swung asunder to take in a potato approaching it on a fo▲; the potato halted, the face lit up redly, and the whole man was on fire with excitement. Then he broke into 246 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ܘ ܘ ܘ ܘ a disjointed checking off of the particulars-his potato cooling in mid-air meantime, and his mouth making a reach for it occasionally, but always bringing up suddenly against a new and still more direful per- formance of my hero. At last he looked his stunned and rigid comrade impressively in the face, and said, with an expression of concentrated awe- "Jim, he b'iled his baby, and he took the old 'oman's skelp. Cuss'd if I want any breakfast!" And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend departed from the restaurant empty but satisfied. He never got down to where the satire part of it began. Nobody ever did. They found the thrilling particulars sufficient. To drop it with a poor little moral at the fag-end of such a gorgeous massacre, was to follow the expiring sun with a candle, and hope to attract the world's attention to it. The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuine occurrence never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was by all those tell-tale absurdities and impossibilities concerning the "great pine forest,' the "dressed-stone mansion," etc. But I found out then, and never have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatory surroundings of marvellously exciting things when we have no occa- sion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and be happy. THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT The Undertaker's Chât. "N° OW, that corpse," said the undertaker, pat- ting the folded hands of deceased approv- ingly, "was a brick-every way you took him he was a brick. He was so real accommodating, and so modest-like and simple in his last moments. Friends wanted metallic burial case-nothing else would do. I couldn't get it. There warn't going to be time- anybody could see that. "Corpse said never mind, shake him up some kind of a box he could stretch out in comfortable, he warn't particular 'bout the general style of it. Said he went more on room than style, any way in a last final container. "Friends wanted a silver door-plate on the coffin, signifying who he was and wher' he was from. Now you know a fellow couldn't roust out such a gaily thing as that in a little country town like this. What did corpse say? "Corpse said, whitewash his old canoe and dob his address and general destination onto it with a black- ing brush and a stencil plate, 'long with a verse from 247 248 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES · i some likely hymn or other, and p'int him for the tomb, and mark him C. O. D., and just let him flicker. He warn't distressed any more than you be on the contrary just as ca'm and collected as a hearse- horse; said he judged that wher' he was going to a body would find it considerable better to attract attention by a picturesque moral character than a natty burial case with a swell door-plate on it. "Splendid man, he was. I'd druther do for a corpse like that'n any I've tackled in seven year. There's some satisfaction in buryin' a man like that. You feel that what you're doing is appreciated. Lord bless you, so's he got planted before he sp'iled, he was perfectly satisfied; said his relations meant well, perfectly well, but all them preparations was bound to delay the thing more or less, and he didn't wish to be kept layin' around. You never see such a clear head as what he had-and so ca'm and so cool. Just a hunk of brains-that is what he was. Perfectly awful. It was a ripping distance from one end of that man's head to t'other. Often and over again he's had brain fever a-raging in one place, and the rest of the pile didn't know anything about it-didn't affect it any more than an Injun insurrection in Ari- zona affects the Atlantic States. "Well, the relations they wanted a big funeral, but corpse said he was down on flummery-didn't want any procession-fill the hearse full of mourners, and get out a stern line and tow him behind. He was the THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT 249 most down on style of any remains I ever struck. A beautiful simple-minded creature-it was what he was, you can depend on that. He was just set on having things the way he wanted them, and he took a solid comfort in laying his little plans. He had me meas- ure him and take a whole raft of directions; then he had the minister stand up behind a long box with a table-cloth over it, to represent the coffin, and read his funeral sermon, saying 'Angcore, angcore!' at the good places, and making him scratch out every bit of brag about him, and all the hifalutin; and then he made them trot out the choir so's he could help them pick out the tunes for the occasion, and he got them to sing 'Pop Goes the Weasel,' because he'd always liked that tune when he was down-hearted, and solemn music made him sad; and when they sung that with tears in their eyes (because they all loved him), and his relations grieving around, he just laid there as happy as a bug, and trying to beat time and showing all over how much he enjoyed it; and presently he got worked up and excited, and tried to join in, for mind you he was pretty proud of his abilities in the sing- ing line; but the first time he opened his mouth and was just going to spread himself his breath took a walk. "I never see a man snuffed out so sudden. Ah, it was a great loss-it was a powerful loss to this poor little one-horse town. Well, well, well, I hain't got time to be palavering along here-got to nail on the 250 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES lid and mosey along with him; and if you'll just give me a lift we'll skeet him into the hearse and meander along. Relations bound to have it so―don't pay no attention to dying injunctions, minute a corpse's gone; but, if I had my way, if I didn't respect his last wishes and tow him behind the hearse I'll be cuss'd. I consider that whatever a corpse wants done for his comfort is little enough matter, and a man hain't got no right to deceive him or take advan- tage of him; and whatever a corpse trusts me to do I'm a-going to do, you know, even if it's to stuff him and paint him yaller and keep him for a keepsake— you hear me me!” He cracked his whip and went lumbering away with his ancient ruin of a hearse, and I continued my walk with a valuable lesson learned-that a healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation. The lesson is likely to be lasting, for it will take many months to obliterate the memory of the remarks and circumstances that impressed it. CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS Concerning Chambermaids. all chambermaids, of whatsoever age or nationality, I launch the curse of bachelordom! Because: They always put the pillows at the opposite end of the bed from the gas-burner, so that while you read and smoke before sleeping (as is the ancient and honored custom of bachelors), you have to hold your book aloft, in an uncomfortable position, to keep the light from dazzling your eyes. When they find the pillows removed to the other end of the bed in the morning, they receive not the suggestion in a friendly spirit; but, glorying in their absolute sovereignty, and unpitying your helpless- ness, they make the bed just as it was originally, and gloat in secret over the pang their tyranny will cause you. Always after that, when they find you have trans- posed the pillows, they undo your work, and thus defy and seek to embitter the life that God has given you. If they cannot get the light in an inconvenient position any other way, they move the bed. 251 252 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES If you pull your trunk out six inches from the wall, so that the lid will stay up when you open it, they always shove that trunk back again. They do it on purpose. If you want the spittoon in a certain spot, where it will be handy, they don't, and so they move it. They always put your other boots into inaccessible places. They chiefly enjoy depositing them as far under the bed as the wall will permit. It is because this compels you to get down in an undignified atti- tude and make wild sweeps for them in the dark with the boot-jack, and swear. They always put the match-box in some other place. They hunt up a new place for it every day, and put up a bottle, or other perishable glass thing, where the box stood before. This is to cause you to break that glass thing, groping in the dark, and get yourself into trouble. They are for ever and ever moving the furniture. When you come in, in the night, you can calculate on finding the bureau where the wardrobe was in the morning. And when you go out in the morning, if you leave the slop-bucket by the door and rocking- chair by the window, when you come in at midnight, or thereabouts, you will fall over that rocking-chair, and you will proceed toward the window and sit down in that slop-tub. This will disgust you. They like that. No matter where you put anything, they are not CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS 253 going to let it stay there. They will take it and move it the first chance they get. It is their nature. And, besides, it gives them pleasure to be mean and contrary this way. They would die if they couldn't be villians. They always save up all the old scraps of printed rubbish you throw on the floor, and stack them up carefully on the table, and start the fire with your valuable manuscripts. If there is any one particular old scrap that you are more down on than any other, and which you are gradually wearing your life out trying to get rid of, you may take all the pains you possibly can in that direction, but it won't be of any use, because they will always fetch that old scrap back and put it in the same old place again every time. It does them good. And they use up more hair-oil than any six men. If charged with purloining the same, they lie about it. What do they care about a hereafter? Abso- lutely nothing. If you leave the key in the door for convenience sake, they will carry it down to the office and give it to the clerk. They do this under the vile pretence of trying to protect your property from thieves; but actually they do it because they want to make you tramp back down-stairs after it when you come home tired, or put you to the trouble of sending a waiter for it, which waiter will expect you to pay him some- thing. In which case I suppose the degraded creatures divide. 254 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES They keep always trying to make your bed before you get up, thus destroying your rest and inflicting agony upon you; but after you get up, they don't come any more till next day. They do all the mean things they can think of, and they do them just out of pure cussedness, and noth- ing else. Chambermaids are dead to every human instinct. If I can get a bill through the Legislature abolish- ing chambermaids, I mean to do it. AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man. THE HE facts in the following case came to me by letter from a young lady who lives in the beauti- ful city of San Jose; she is perfectly unknown to me, and simple signs herself "Aurelia Maria," which may possibly be a fictitious name. But no matter, the poor girl is almost heart-broken by the misfortunes she has undergone, and so confused by the conflicting counsels of misguided friends and insidious enemies, that she does not know what course to pursue in order to extricate herself from the web of difficulties in which she seems almost hopelessly involved. In this dilemma she turns to me for help, and supplicates for my guidance and instruction with a moving eloquence that would touch the heart of a statue. Hear her sad story: She says that when she was sixteen years old she met and loved, with all the devotion of a passionate nature, a young man from New Jersey, named Wil- liamson Breckinridge Caruthers, who was some six years her senior. They were engaged, with the free consent of their friends and relatives, and for a time 255 256 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES it seemed as if their career was destined to be char- acterized by an immunity from sorrow beyond the usual lot of humanity: But at last the tide of fortune turned; young Caruthers became infected with small- pox of the most virulent type, and when he recovered from his illness his face was pitted like a waffle-mould, and his comeliness gone for ever. Aurelia thought to break off the engagement at first, but pity for her unfortunate lover caused her to postpone the mar- riage-day for a season, and give him another trial. The very day before the wedding was to have taken place, Breckinridge, while absorbed in watching the flight of a balloon, walked into a well and fractured one of his legs, and it had to be taken off above the knee. Again Aurelia was moved to break the engage- ment, but again love triumphed, and she set the day forward and gave him another chance to reform. And again misfortune overtook the unhappy youth. He lost one arm by the premature discharge of a Fourth-of-July cannon, and within three months he got the other pulled out by a carding-machine. Aurelia's heart was almost crushed by these latter calamities. She could not but be deeply grieved to see her lover passing from her by piecemeal, feel- ing, as she did, that he could not last for ever under this disastrous process of reduction, yet knowing of no way to stop its dreadful career, and in her tearful despair she almost regretted, like brokers who hold on and lose, that she had not taken him at first, AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN 257 before he had suffered such an alarming depreciation. Still, her brave soul bore her up, and she resolved to bear with her friend's unnatural disposition yet a little longer. Again the wedding-day approached, and again dis- appointment overshadowed it; Caruthers fell ill with the erysipelas, and lost the use of one of his eyes entirely. The friends and relatives of the bride, con- sidering that she had already put up with more than could reasonably be expected of her, now came forward and insisted that the match should be broken off, but after wavering awhile, Aurelia, with a generous spirit which did her credit, said she had reflected calmly upon the matter, and could not discover that Breck- inridge was to blame. So she extended the time once more, and he broke his other leg. It was a sad day for the poor girl when she saw the surgeons reverently bearing away the sack whose uses she had learned by previous experience, and her heart told her the bitter truth that some more of her lover was gone. She felt that the field of her affections was growing more and more circumscribed every day, but once more she frowned down her relatives and renewed her betrothal. Shortly before the time set for the nuptials another disaster occurred. There was but one man scalped by the Owens River Indians last year. That man was Williamson Breckinridge Caruthers, of New Jer- ? 17 258 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES sey. He was hurrying home with happiness in his heart, when he lost his hair forever, and in that hour of bitterness he almost cursed the mistaken mercy that had spared his head. At last Aurelia is in serious perplexity as to what she ought to do. She still loves her Breckinridge, she writes, with truly womanly feeling-she still loves what is left of him—but her parents are bitterly op- posed to the match, because he has no property and is disabled from working, and she has not sufficient means to support both comfortably. "Now, what should she do?" she asks with painful and anxious solicitude. It is a delicate question; it is one which involves the life-long happiness of a woman, and that of nearly two-thirds of a man, and I feel that it would be assuming too great a responsibility to do more than make a mere suggestian in the case. How would it do to build to him? If Aurelia can afford the expense, let her furnish her mutilated lover with wooden arms and wooden legs, and a glass eye and a wig, and give him another show; give him ninety days, with- out grace, and if he does not break his neck in the meantime, marry him and take the chances. It does not seem to me that there is much risk, any way, Aurelia, because if he sticks to his singular propensity for damaging himself every time he sees a good opportunity, his next experiment is bound to finish him, and then you are safe, married or single. If AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN 259 17 14. 1 : married, the wooden legs and such other valuables as he may possess revert to the widow, and you see you sustain no actual loss save the cherished fragment of a noble but most unfortunate husband, who hon- estly strove to do right, but whose extraordinary instincts were against him. Try it, Maria. I have thought the matter over carefully and well, and it is the only chance I see for you. It would have been a happy conceit on the part of Caruthers if he had started with his neck and broken that first; but since he has seen fit to choose a different policy and string himself out as long as possible, I do not think we ought to upbraid him for it if he has enjoyed it. We must do the best we can under the circumstances and try not to feel exasperated at him. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES "After" Jenkins. A GRAND affair of a ball-the Pioneers'—came off at the Occidental some time ago. The fol- lowing notes of the costumes worn by the ladies of the occasion may not be uninteresting to the general reader, and Jenkins may get an idea therefrom- Mrs. W. M. was attired in an elegant pate de foie gras, made expressly for her, and was greatly ad- mired. Miss S. had her hair done up. She was the centre of attraction for the gentlemen and the envy of all the ladies, Mrs. G. W. was tastefully dressed in a tout ensemble, and was greeted with deafening applause wherever she went. Mrs. C. N. was superbly arrayed in white kid gloves. Her modest and engag- ing manner accorded well with the unpretending simplicity of her costume and caused her to be re- garded with absorbing interest by every one. The charming Mrs. M. M. B. appeared in a thrilling waterfall, whose exceeding grace and volume com- pelled the homage of pioneers and emigrants alike. How beautiful she was! The queenly Miss L. R. was attractively attired in 260 "AFTER" JENKINS 261 her new and beautiful false teeth, and the bon jour effect they naturally produced was heightened by her enchanting and well sustained smile. Miss R. P., with that repugnance to ostentation in dress, which is so peculiar to her, was attired in a simple white lace collar, fastened with a neat pearl- button solitaire. The fine contrast between the spark- ling vivacity of her natural optic, and the steadfast attentiveness of her placid glass eye, was the subject of general and enthusiastic remark. Miss C. L. B. had her fine nose elegantly enamelled, and the easy grace with which she blew it from time to time, marked her as a cultivated and accomplished woman of the world; its exquisitely modulated tone excited the admiration of all who had the happiness to hear it. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES About Barbers. A LL things change exept barbers, the ways of -barbers, and the surroundings of barbers. These never change. What one experiences in a barber's shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in barbers' shops afterwards till the end of his days. I got shaved this morning as usual. A man approached the door from Jones Street as I approached it from Main-a thing that always hap- pens. I hurried up, but it was of no use; he entered the door one little step ahead of me, and I followed in on his heels and saw him take the only vacant chair, the one presided over by the best barber. It always happens so. I sat down, hoping that I might fall heir to the chair belonging to the better of the re- maining two barbers, for he had already begun comb- ing his man's hair, while his comrade was not yet quite done rubbing up and oiling his customer's locks. I watched the probabilities with strong inter- est. When I saw that No. 2 was gaining on No. 1 my interest grew to solicitude. When No. 1 stopped a moment to make change on a bath ticket for a new 262 ABOUT BARBERS 263 comer, and lost ground in the race, my solicitude rose to anxiety. When No. 1 caught up again, and both he and his comrade were pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customer's cheeks, and it was about an even thing which one would say "Next!" first, my very breath stood still with the suspense. But when at the culminating moment No. 1 stopped to pass a comb a couple of times through his customer's eyebrows, I saw that he had lost the race by a single instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop, to keep from falling into the hands of No. 2; for I have none of that enviable firmness that enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he will wait for his fellow-barber's chair. I stayed out fifteen minutes, and then went back, hoping for better luck. Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting, silent, unsociable, distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who are waiting their turn in a barber's shop. I sat down in one of the iron-armed compart- ments of an old sofa, and put in the time for a while reading the framed advertisements of all sorts of quack nostrums for dyeing and coloring the hair. Then I read the greasy names on the private bay rum bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the private shaving cups in the pigeon-holes; studied the stained and damaged cheap prints on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and voluptuous recumbent 264 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES sultanas, and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting her grandfather's spectacles on ; execrated in my heart the cheerful canary and the distracting parrot that few barbers' shops are without. Finally, I searched out the least dilapidated of last year's illustrated papers that littered the foul centre-table, and conned their unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events. At last my turn came. A voice said "Next!" and I surrendered to-No. 2, of course. It always happens so. I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it. He shoved up my head, and put a napkin under it. He ploughed his fingers into my collar and fixed a towel there. He explored my hair with his claws and suggested that it needed trimming. I said I did not want it trimmed. He explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style-better have a little taken off; it needed it behind especially. I said I had had it cut only a week before. He yearned over it reflectively a moment, and then asked with a dispar- aging manner, who cut it? I came back at him promptly with a "You did!" I had him there. Then he fell to stirring up his lather and regarding himself in the glass, stopping now and then to get close and examine his chin critically or inspect a pimple. Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the other, when a dog fight attracted his attention, and he ran to the window and stayed ABOUT BARBERS 265 and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction. He finished lathering, and then began to rub in the suds with his hand. He now began to sharpen his razor on an old suspender, and was delayed a good deal on account of a controversy about a cheap masquerade ball he had figured at the night before, in red cambric and bogus ermine, as some kind of a king. He was so gratified with being chaffed about some damsel whom he had smitten with his charms that he used every means to continue the controversy by pretending to be annoyed at the chaffings of his fellows. This matter begot more sur- veyings of himself in the glass, and he put down his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care, plas- tering an inverted arch of it down on his forehead, accomplishing an accurate "part" behind, and brush- ing the two wings forward over his ears with nice exactness. In the meantime the lather was drying on my face, and apparently eating into my vitals. Now he began to shave, digging his fingers into my countenance to stretch the skin and bundling and tumbling my head this way and that as convenience in shaving demanded. As long as he was on the tough sides of my face I did not suffer; but when he began to rake, and rip, and tug at my chin, the tears He now made a handle of my nose, to assist him in shaving the corners of my upper lip, and it was by this bit of circumstantial evidence that I dis- came. L 1 266 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES covered that a part of his duties in the shop was to clean the kerosene lamps. I had often wondered in an indolent way whether the barbers did that, or whether it was the boss. About this time I was amusing myself trying to guess where he would be most likely to cut me this time, but he got ahead of me, and sliced me on the Under biz -- Wius. end of the chin before I had got my mind made up. He immediately sharpened his razor-he might have done it before. I do not like a close shave, and would not let him go over me a second time. I tried to get him to put up his razor, dreading that he would make for the side of my chin, my pet tender spot, a place ABOUT BARBERS 267 which a razor cannot touch twice without making trouble; but he said he only wanted to just smooth off one little roughness, and in the same moment he slipped the razor along the forbidden ground, and the dreaded pimple-signs of a close shave rose up smarting and answered to the call. Now he soaked his towel in bay rum, and slapped it all over my face nastily; slapped it over as if a human being ever yet washed his face in that way. Then he dried it by slapping with the dry part of the towel, as if a human being ever driel his face in such a fashion; but a barber seldom rubs you like a Christian. Next he poked bay rum into the cut place with his towel, then choked the wound with powdered starch, then soaked it with bay rum again, and would have gone on soaking and powdering it for evermore, no doubt, if I had not rebelled and begged off. He powdered my whole face now, straightened me up, and began to plough my hair thoughtfully with his hands. Then he suggested a shampoo, and said my hair needed it badly, very badly. I observed that I sham- pooed it myself very thoroughly in the bath yester- day. I "had him" again. He next recommended some of "Smith's Hair Glorifier," and offered to sell me a bottle. I declined. He praised the new per- fume "Jones' Delight of the Toilet," and proposed to sell me some of that. I declined again. He tend- ered me a toothwash atrocity of his own invention, and when I declined offered to trade knives with me. .. 268 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES He returned to business after the miscarriage of this last enterprise, sprinkled me all over, legs and all, greased my hair in defiance of my protest against it, rubbed and scrubbed a good deal of it out by the roots, and combed and brushed the rest, parting it behind and plastering the eternal inverted arch of hair down on my forehead, and then, while combing my scant eyebrows and defiling them with pomade, strung out an account of the achievements of a six- ounce black and tan terrier of his till I heard the whistles blow for noon, and knew I was five minutes too late for the train. Then he snatched away the towel, brushed it lightly about my face, passed his comb through my eyebrows once more, and gaily sang out "Next!" This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later. I am waiting over a day for my revenge -I am going to attend his funeral. HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF History Repeats Itself. THE HE following I find in a Sandwich Island paper which some friend has sent me from that tran- quil far-off retreat. The coincidence between my own experience and that here set down by the late Mr. Benton is so remarkable that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the paragraph. The Sandwich Island paper says:- “How touching is this tribute of the late Hon. T. H. Benton to his mother's influence:-'My mother asked me never to use tobacco; I have never touched it from that time to the present day. She asked me not to gamble, and I have never gambled. I cannot tell who is losing in games that are being played. She admon- ished me, too, against liquor-drinking, and whatever capacity for endurance I have at present, and whatever usefulness I may have attained through life, I attribute to having complied with her pious and correct wishes. When I was seven years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence; and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my mother.' I never saw anything so curious. It is almost an exact epitome of my own moral career—after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother. How well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use 269 270 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ; tobacco, good old soul! She said, "You're at it again, are you, you whelp? Now, don't ever let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay I'll blacksnake you within an inch of your life!" I have never touched it at that hour of the morning from that time to the present day. She asked me not to gamble, She whispered and said, "Put up those wicked cards this minute!-two pair and a jack, you numskull, and the other fellow's got a flush!" I never have gambled from that day to this-never once-without a "cold deck" in my pocket. I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games that are being played unless I dealt myself. When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total absti- nence. That I have adhered to it and enjoyed the beneficent effects of it through all time, I owe to my grandmother. I have never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water. HONOURED AS A CURIOSITY Honoured as a Curiosity. IF F you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu, and experience that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and address him as "Captain." Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his counte- nance that you are on the wrong track, ask him where he preaches. It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler. I became per- sonally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six missionaries. The captains and ministers form one-half of the population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile for- eigners and their families; and the final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian Govern- ment. And there are just about cats enough for three apiece all around. A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs one day, and said: "Good morning, your reverence. Preach in the stone church yonder, no doubt!” 271 272 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES "No, I don't. I'm not a preacher." "Really, I beg your pardon, captain. I trust you had a good season. How much oil" "Oil! Why what do you take me for? I'm not a whaler." "Oh! I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency. Major-General in the household troops, no doubt? Minister of the Interior, likely? Secretary of War? First Gentleman of the Bedchamber? Commissioner of the Royal" "Stuff! man. I'm not connected in any way with the Government." "Bless my life! Then who the mischief are you? what the mischief are you? and how the mischief did you get here? and where in thunder did you come from?" "I'm only a private personage an unassuming stranger-lately arrived from America." "No! Not a missionary! not a whaler! not a mem- ber of his Majesty's Government! not even Secretary of the Navy! Ah! heaven! it is too blissful to be true; alas! I do but dream. And yet that noble, honest countenance-those oblique, ingenuous eyes-that massive head, incapable of-of anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif. Excuse these tears. For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this, and❞— Here his feeling was too much for him, and he HONOURED AS A CURIOSITY 273 swooned away. I pitied this poor creature from the bottom of my heart. I was deeply moved. I shed a few tears on him, and kissed him for his mother. I then took what small change he had, and "shoved." •* 18 MARK TWAIN'S_SKETCHES The Late Benjamin Franklin. ["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as well."-B. F.]^ THIS HIS party was one of those persons whom they call Philosophers. He was twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of Boston. These houses remain unto this day, and have signs upon them worded in accordance with the facts. The signs are considered well enough to have, though not necessary, because the inhabitants point out the two birth-places to the stranger anyhow, and sometimes as often as several times in the same day. The subject of this memoir was of a vicious disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all sub- sequent ages. His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up far the emulation of boys for ever-boys who might otherwise have been happy. It was in this spirit that he became the son of a soap-boiler, and probably for no other reason than that the efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything might be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers. With a C~: THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 275 malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work all day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the light of a smoulder- ing fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them. Not satisfied with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal time-a thing which has brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's pernicious biography. His maxims were full of animosity towards boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural / 276 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES instinct without tumbling over some of those ever- lasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, "Remember what Franklin has said, my son-'A groat a day's a penny a year;'" and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts. If he wants to spin his top when he has done work, his father quotes, "Procrastination is the thief of time." If he does a virtuous action, he never gets anything for it, because "Virtue is its own reward." And that boy is hounded to death and robbed of his natural rest, because Franklin said once, in one of his inspired flights of malignity— "Early to bed and early to rise Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise." As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms. The sorrow that that maxim has cost me through my parents' exper- imenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell. The legitimate result is my present state of general debil- ity, indigence, and mental aberration. My parents used to have me up before nine o'clock in the morn- ing, sometimes, when I was a boy. If they had let me take my natural rest, where would I have been now? Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all. And what an adroit old adventurer the subject of this memoir was! In order to get a chance to fly his kite on Sunday he used to hang a key on the string and let on to be fishing for lightning. And a guileless THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 277 public would go home chirping about the "wisdom" and the "genius" of the hoary Sabbath-breaker. If anybody caught him playing "mumble-peg" by him- self, after the age of sixty, he would immediately appear to be ciphering out how the grass grew—as if it was any of his business. My grandfather knew him well, and he says Franklin was always fixed— always ready. If a body, during his old age, hap- pened on him unexpectedly when he was catching flies, or making mud pies, or sliding on a cellar-door, he would immediately look wise, and rip out a maxim, and walk off with his nose in the air and his cap turned wrong side before, trying to appear absent- minded and eccentric. He was a hard lot. He invented a stove that would smoke your head off in four hours by the clock. One can see the almost devilish satisfaction he took in it by his giving it his name. He was always proud of telling how he entered Philadelphia for the first time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four rolls of bread under his arm. But really, when you come to examine it critically, it was nothing. Anybody could have done it. To the subject of this memoir belongs the honor of recommending the army to go back to bows and arrows in place of bayonets and muskets. He ob- served, with his customary force, that the bayonet was very well under some circumstances, but that he 278 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES doubted whether it could be used with accuracy at a long range. Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel; and also to snub his stove, and his military inspirations, his unseemly endeavor to make himself conspicuous when he entered Phila- delphia, and his flying his kite and fooling away his time in all sorts of such ways when he ought to have been foraging for soap-fat, or constructing candles. I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent calamitous idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great genius by working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night instead of waiting till morning like a Christian; and that this program, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father's fool. It is time these gentlemen were finding out that these execrable eccentricities of instinct and conduct are only the evidences of genius, not the creators of it. I wish I had been the father of my parents long enough to make them comprehend this truth, and thus prepare them to let their son have an easier time of it. When THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 279 QURAN I was a child I had to boil soap, notwithstanding my father was wealthy, and I had to get up early and study geometry at breakfast, and peddle my own poetry, and do everything just as Franklin did, in the solemn hope that I would be a Franklin some day. And here I am. WHERE WAS BAN GYN 修 ​Power MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES J The Blind Letter" Department, London P. O. 86 A BOUT the most curious feature of the London post-office is the "Blind-Letter" Department. Only one clerk is employed in it and sometimes his place is a sinecure for a day at a time, and then again TheRev JA Hatchord" 107 Maria tiöige • par pour tout gen put your kit for vodky sun til it is just the reverse. His specialty is a wonderful knack in the way of deciphering atrocious penman- ship. That man can read anything that is done with 280 "BLIND LETTER” DEPARTMENT, LONDON P. O. 281 a pen. All superscriptions are carried to him which the mighty army of his fellow clerks cannot make out, and he spells them off like print and sends them on their way. He keeps in a book, fac-sim- iles of the most astonishing specimens he comes across. He also keeps fac-similes of many of the envelopes that pass through the office with queer pictures drawn upon them. He was kind enough By whomn we are Surrounded BTHR A w RED IDNEY STOCKTON-ON-TEES. THEATRE ROYAL SQ to have some of the picture- envelopes and execrable superscriptions copied for me, (the latter 282 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES with "translations" added,) and I here offer them for INTELLIGENCE OFFICE FOR MINISTERS. Z SENT BY ONE CLERGYMAN TO ANOTHER. Mifs Brooke Kings worthy ہے مست Coln Må Guire 17 "Royal Rest Harly untwood M Eoock the inspection of the curious reader. “BLIND LETTER” DEPARTMENT, LONDON P. O. 283 Amelia CFL PH. Gosset. llll Va U.S., America, "((1+/))" الله)) Stamp Ireland General Post Office HIILFRE //// ལཔ་གིས Miss Gary Bally corge Ballinas C Mago. 284 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES ขอบ chill Q B 3 DUNDREARY OREAMS OF HOME. IIIII KYTI CB Doctor Cameron 137 &.28 St. New Youth Americ O “BLIND LETTER" DEPARTMENT, LONDON P. O. 285 ་་ Freland. Miss Joey Ballycory Ballina "C. Mayo, Who to the t quen prucef b the nd the Des [TO THE MAJESTY THE QUEEN, AND THE PRINCESS OF Wales.) ! MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES First Interview with Artemus Ward. I HAD never seen him before. He brought letters of introduction from mutual friends in San Fran- cisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with him. It was almost religion, there in the silver mines, to pre- cede such a meal with whiskey cocktails. Artemus, with the true cosmopolitan instinct, always deferred to the customs of the country he was in, and so he ordered three of those abominations. Hingston was present. I said I would rather not drink a whiskey cocktail. I said it would go right to my head, and confuse me so that I would be in a helpless tangle in ten minutes. I did not want to act like a lunatic before strangers. But Artemus gently insisted, and I drank the treasonable mixture under protest, and felt all the time that I was doing a thing I might be sorry for. In a minute or two I began to imagine that my ideas were clouded. I waited in great anxiety for the conversation to open, with a sort of vague hope that my understanding would prove clear, after all, and my misgivings groundless. Artemus dropped an unimportant remark or two, 286 FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD 287 and then assumed a look of superhuman earnestness, and made the following astounding speech. He said:- "Now there is one thing I ought to ask you about before I forget it. You have been here in Silverland -here in Nevada-two or three years, and, of course, your position on the daily press has made it necessary for you to go down in the mines and examine them carefully in detail, and therefore you know all about the silver-mining business. Now, what I want to get at is-is, well, the way the deposits of ore are made, you know. For instance. Now, as I understand it, the vein which contains the silver is sandwiched in between casings of granite, and runs along the ground, and sticks up like a curb-stone. Well, take a vein forty feet thick, for example, or eighty, for that mat ter, or even a hundred-say you go down on it with a shaft, straight down, you know, or with what you call 'incline,' maybe you go down five hundred feet, or maybe you don't go down but two hundred-any way you go down, and all the time this vein grows narrower, when the casings come nearer or approach each other, you may say-that is, when they do approach, which of course they do not always do, particularly in cases where the nature of the forma- tion is such that they stand apart wider than they otherwise would, and which geology has failed to account for, although everything in that science goes to prove that, all things being equal, it would if it 288 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES did not, or would not certainly if it did, and then of course they are. Do not you think it is?” I said to myself:- "Now I just knew how it would be-that whiskey cocktail has done the business for me; I don't under- stand any more than a clam." And then I said aloud- "I-I-that is-if you don't mind, would you- would you say that over again? I ought"- "Oh, certainly, certainly! You see I am very unfamiliar with the subject, and perhaps I don't present my case clearly, but I”— “No, no-no, no-you state it plain enough, but that cocktail has muddled me a little. But I will- no, I do understand for that matter; but I would get the hang of it all the better if you went over it again -and I'll pay better attention this time." He said, "Why, what I was after was this." [Here he became even more fearfully impressive than ever, and emphasized each particular point by check- ing it off on his finger ends.] "This vein, or lode, or ledge, or whatever you call it, runs along between two layers of granite, just the same as if it were a sandwich. Very well. Now, sup- pose you go down on that, say a thousand feet, or maybe twelve hundred (it don't really matter), be- fore you drift, and then you start your drifts, some of them across the ledge, and others along the length of it, where the sulphurets-I believe they call them FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD 289 sulphurets, though why they should, considering that, so far as I can see, the main dependence of a miner does not so lie, as some suppose, but in which it can- not be successfully maintained, wherein the same should not continue, while part and parcel of the same ore not committed to either in the sense referred to, whereas, under different circumstances, the most inexperienced among us could not detect it if it were, or might overlook it if it did, or scorn the very idea of such a thing, even though it were palably demon- strated as such. Am I not right?" I said, sorrowfully-"I feel ashamed of myself, Mr. Ward. I know I ought to understand you perfectly well, but you see that treacherous whiskey cocktail has got into my head, and now I cannot understand even the simplest proposition. I told you how it would be." "Oh, don't mind it, don't mind it; the fault was my own, no doubt-though I did think it clear enough for". "Don't say a word. Clear! Why, you stated it as clear as the sun to anybody but an abject idiot; but it's that confounded cocktail that has played the mischief." "No; now don't say that. I'll begin it all over again, and❞—________ "Don't now-for goodness sake, don't do anything of the kind, because I tell you my head is in such a 19 M 290 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES condition that I don't believe I could understand the most trifling question a man could ask me.' "" "Now, don't you be afraid, I'll put it so plain this time that you can't help but get the hang of it. We will begin at the very beginning." [Leaning far across the table, with determined impressiveness wrought upon his every feature, and fingers prepared to keep tally of each point as enumerated; and I, leaning forward with painful interest, resolved to comprehend or perish.] "You know the vein, the ledge, the thing that contains the metal, whereby it constitutes the medium between all other forces, whether of present or remote agencies, so brought to bear in favor of the former against the latter, or the latter against the former or all, or both, or compro- mising the relative differences existing within the radius whence culminate the several degrees of simi- larity to which". I said—“Oh, hang my wooden head, it ain't any use!--it ain't any use to try-I can't understand any- thing. The plainer you get it the more I can't get the hang of it.' "" I heard a suspicious noise behind me, and turned in time to see Hingston dodging behind a newspaper, and quaking with a gentle ecstasy of laughter. I looked at Ward again, and he had thrown off his dread solemnity and was laughing also. Then I saw that I had been sold-that I had been made the vic- tim of a swindle in the way of a string of plausibly → FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD 291 : 11 worded sentences that didn't mean anything under the sun. Artemus Ward was one of the best fellows in the world, and one of the most companionable. It has been said that he was not fluent in conversa- tion, but, with the above experience in my mind, I differ. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Cannibalism in the Cars. I VISITED St. Louis lately, and on my way west, after changing cars at Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about forty- five, or may be fifty, came in at one of the way- stations and sat down beside me. We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertain- ing. When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask questions about various public men, and about Congressional affairs; and I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capital, even to the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and Representatives in the Chambers of the National Leg- islature. Presently two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other: "Harris, if you'll do that for me, I'll never forget you, my boy." My new comrade's eyes lighted pleasantly. The words had touched upon a happy memory, I thought. - 292 CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS 293 Then his face settled into thoughtfulness-almost into gloom. He turned to me and said, "Let me tell you a story; let me give you a secret chapter of my life-a chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events transpired. Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt me." I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure, speaking sometimes with anima- tion, sometimes with melancholy, but always with feeling and earnestness. THE STRANGER'S NARRATIVE. "On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening train bound for Chicago. There were only twenty-four passengers, all told. There were no ladies and no children. We were in excellent spirits, and pleasant acquaintanceships were formed. The journey bade fair to be a happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had even the vaguest presentment of the horrors we were soon to undergo. "At 11 P. M. it began to snow hard. Shortly after leaving the small village of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away towards the Jubilee Settlements. The winds, unob- structed by trees or hills, or even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving the falling snow before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy sea. The snow was deepening 294 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES 1 fast; and we knew, by the diminished speed of the train, that the engine was ploughing through it with steadily increasing difficulty. Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes, in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves across the track. Conversation began to flag. Cheerfulness gave place to grave concern. The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every mind, and extended its depressing influence over every spirit. "At two o'clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by the ceasing of all motion about me. The appalling truth flashed upon me instantly-we were captives in a snow-drift! 'All hands to the rescue!' Every man sprang to obey. Out into the wild night, the pitchy darkness, the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all. Shovels, hands, boards -anything, everything that could displace snow, was brought into instant requisition. It was a weird picture, that small company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the blackest shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotive's reflector. "One short hour sufficed to prove the utter useless- ness of our efforts. The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away. And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS 295 charge the engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the driving-wheel! With a free track before us we should still have been helpless. We entered the car wearied with labor, and very sorrowful. We gathered about the stoves, and gravely canvassed our situation. We had no pro- visions whatever-in this lay our chief distress. We could not freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender. This was our only comfort. The dis- cussion ended at last in accepting the disheartening decision of the conductor, viz., that it would be death for any man to attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that. We could not send for help; and even if we could, it could not come. We must submit, and await, as patiently as we might, succor or starvation! I think the stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words were uttered. "Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the biast ; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled themselves among the 'flickering shadows to think- to forget the present, if they could-to sleep, if they might. "The eternal night-it surely seemed eternal to us -wore its lagging hours away at last, and the cold grey dawn broke in the east. As the light grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of life, one after another, and each in turn pushed his I Ige Ju + * 296 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES slouched hat up from his forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out at the windows upon the cheerless prospect. It was cheerless indeed!—not a living thing visible anywhere, not a human habita- tion; nothing but a vast white desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the wind- a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above. "All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much. Another lingering dreary night— and hunger. "Another dawning-another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger, hopeless watching for succor that could not come. A night of restless slumber, filled with dreams of feasting-wakings distressed with the gnawings of hunger. "The fourth day came and went-and the fifth! Five days of dreadful imprisonment! A savage hun- ger looked out at every eye. There was in it a sign of awful import—the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely shaping itself in every heart—a something which no tongue dared yet to frame into words. "The sixth day passed-the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death. It must out now! That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready to leap from every lip at last! Nature had been taxed to the utmost-she must CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS 297 + yield. RICHARD H. GASTON, of Minnesota, tall, cadav- erous, and pale, rose up. All knew what was coming. All prepared-every emotion, every semblance of excitement was smothered-only a calm, thoughtful seriousness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild. "Gentlemen,-It cannot be delayed longer! The time is at hand! We must determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest!' "Mr. JOHN J. WILLIAMS, of Illinois, rose and said: 'Gentlemen,-I nominate the Rev. James Sawyer, of Tennessee.' "Mr. Wм. R. ADAMS, of Indiana, said: 'I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote, of New York.' “Mr. CHARLES J. LANGDON: 'I nominate Mr. Samuel A. Bowen, of St. Louis.' "Mr. SLOTE: 'Gentlemen,-I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A. Van Nostrand, Jun., of New Jersey.' "Mr. GASTON: 'If there be no objection, the gen- tleman's desire will be acceded to." "Mr. VAN NOSTRAND objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected. The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and refused upon the same grounds. "Mr. A. L. BASCOM, of Ohio: 'I move that the nominations now close, and that the House proceed to an election by ballot.' "Mr. SAWYER: 'Gentlemen,-I protest earnestly 298 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES against these proceedings. They are, in every way, irregular and unbecoming. I must beg to move that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the meeting and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the business before us under- standingly.' "Mr. BELL, of Iowa: 'Gentlemen,-I object. This is no time to stand upon forms and ceremonious observances. For more than seven days we have been without food. Every moment we lose in idle discussion increases our distress. I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made-every gentle- man present is, I believe-and I, for one, do not see why we should not proceed at once to elect one or more of them. I wish to offer a resolution—” "Mr. GASTON: 'It would be objected to, and have to lie over one day under the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid. The gentle- man from New Jersey- "Mr. VAN NOSTRAND: 'Gentlemen,-I am a stranger among you; I have not sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a delicacy- "Mr. MORGAN, of Alabama (interrupting): 'Imove the previous question.' "The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course. The motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen chairman, Mr. Blake secretary, Messrs. Holcomb, Dyer, and Bald- win, a committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. 1 CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS 299 Howland, purveyor, to assist the committee in mak- ing selections. "A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucussing followed. At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the committee reported in favor of Messrs. George Ferguson, of Kentucky, Lucien Herrian, of Louisiana, and W. Messick, of Colorado, as candidates. The report was accepted. "Mr. ROGERS, of Missouri: 'Mr. President,-The report being properly before the House now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of Mr. Herrman that of Mr. Lucius Harris, of St. Louis, who is well and honorably known to us all. I do not wish to be understood as casting the least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentle- man from Louisiana-far from it. I respect and esteem him as much as any gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us can be blind to the fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here than any among us-none of us can be blind to the fact that the committee has been derelict to its duty, either through negligence or a graver fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gen- tleman who, however pure his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him-' "THE CHAIR: "The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat. The Chair cannot allow the integrity of the Committee to be questioned save by the regular course, under the rules. What action will the House take upon the gentleman's motion?' 300 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES "Mr. HALLIDAY, of Virginia: 'I move to further amend the report by substituting Mr. Harvey Davis, of Oregon, for Mr. Messick. It may be urged by gen- tlemen that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have rendered Mr. Davis tough; but, gentlemen, is this a time to cavil at toughness? is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles? is this a time to dis- pute about matters of paltry significance? No, gen- men, bulk is what we desire-substance, weight, bulk -these are the supreme requisites now-not talent, not genius, not education. I insist upon my motion.' "Mr. MORGAN (excitedly): 'Mr. Chairman,—I do most strenuously object to this amendment. The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is bulky only in bone-not in flesh. I ask the gentleman from Virginia if it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance? if he would delude us with shadows? if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonial spectre? I ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can gaze into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us! I ask him if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark future, and still unpity- ingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this totter- ing swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from Oregon's inhospitable shores? Never!' (Applause.) "The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery de- Q CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS 301 bate, and lost. Hr. Harris was substituted on the first amendment. The balloting then began. Five ballots were held without a choice. On the sixth, Mr. Harris was elected, all voting for him but him- self. It was then moved that his election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in conse- quence of his again voting against himself. "Mr. RADWAY moved that the House now take up the remaining candidates, and go into an election for breakfast. This was carried. "On the first ballot there was a tie, half the mem- bers favoring one candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account of his superior size. The President gave the casting vote for the latter, Mr. Messick. This decision created considera- ble dissatisfaction among the friends of Mr. Fergu- son, the defeated candidate, and there was some talk of demanding a new ballot; but in the midst of it, a motion to adjourn was carried, and the meeting broke up at once. "The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then, when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr. Harris was ready, drove all thought of it to the winds. "We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car-seats, and sat down with hearts full of grati- tude to the finest supper that had blessed our vision 302 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES for seven torturing days. How changed we were from what we had been a few short hours before! Hope- less, sad-eyed misery, hunger, feverish anxiety, des- peration, then-thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep for utterance now. That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful life. The wind howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison-house, but they were powerless to distress us any more. I liked Harris. He might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree of satisfaction. Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored, but for genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fibre, give me Harris. Messick had his good points-I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish to do it-but he was no more fitted for break- fast than a mummy would be, sir-not a bit. Lean? -why, bless me!-and tough? Ah, he was very tough! You could not imagine it, you could never imagine anything like it.” "Do you mean to tell me that "Do not interrupt me, please. After breakfast we elected a man by the name of Walker, from Detroit, for supper. He was very good. I wrote his wife so afterwards. He was worthy of all praise. I shall always remember Walker. He was a little rare, but very good. And then the next morning we had Morgan, of Alabama, for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to,-handsome, edu- "" MOR CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS 303 cated, refined, spoke several languages fluently—a perfect gentleman-he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy. For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud, there is no question about it-old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture the reality. I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I will wait for another election. And Grimes, of Illinois, said, 'Gentlemen, I will wait also. When you elect a man that has something to recom- mend him, I shall be glad to join you again.' It soon became evident that there was general dissatis- faction with Davis, of Oregon, and so, to preserve the good-will that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had Harris, an election was called, and the result of it was that Baker, of Georgia, was chosen. He was splendid! Well, well-after that we had Doolittle and Hawkins, and McElroy (there was some complaint about McElroy, because he was uncom- monly short and thin), and Penrod, and two Smiths, and Bailey (Bailey had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he was otherwise good), and an Indian boy, and an organ grinder, and a gentleman by the name of Buckminster-a poor stick of a vagabond that wasn't any good for company and no account for breakfast. We were glad we got him elected before relief came." "And so the blessed relief did come at last?". "Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election. John Murphy was the choice, and there 304 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES never was a better, I am willing to testify; but John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to succor us, and lived to marry the widow Harris-' "Relict of" "Relict of our first choice. He married her, and is happy and respected and prosperous yet. Ah, it was like a novel, sir—it was like a romance. This is my stopping-place, sir; I must bid you good-by. Any time that you can make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be glad to have you. I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you. I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir. Good day, sir, and a pleasant journey.' He was gone. I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my life. But in my soul I was glad he was gone. With all his gentleness of manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly stood still! I was bewildered beyond description. I did not doubt his word; I could not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness of truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my thoughts into hopeless confusion. I saw the conductor looking at me. I said, "Who is that man?" "He was a member of Congress once, and a good CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS 305 one. But he got caught in a snowdrift in the cars, and like to been starved to death. He got so frost- bitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three months afterwards. He is all right now, only he is a monomania, and when he gets on that old subject he never stops till he has eat up that whole car-load of people he talks about. He would have finished the crowd by this time, only he had to get out here. He has got their names as pat as A, B, C. When he gets them all eat up but himself, he always says:-"Then the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived, and there being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no objections offered, I resigned. Thus I am here." " I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal. 20 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES The Scriptural Panoramist. THER HERE was a fellow traveling around in that country," said Mr. Nickerson, "with a moral- religious show-a sort of scriptural panorama-and he hired a wooden-headed old slab to play the piano for him. After the first night's performance the show- man says- "My friend, you seem to know pretty much all the tunes there are, and you worry along first-rate. But then, don't you notice that sometimes last night the piece you happened to be playing was a little rough on the proprieties, so to speak-didn't seem to jibe with the general gait of the picture that was passing at the time, as it were-was a little foreign to the subject, you know-as if you didn't either trump or follow suit, you understand?' "'Well, no,' the fellow said; 'he hadn't noticed, but it might be; he had played along just as it came handy.' "So they put it up that the simple old dummy was to keep his eye on the panorama after that, and as soon as a stunning picture was reeled out he was to fit it to a dot with a piece of music that would help the audience to get the idea of the subject, and warm them up like a camp-meeting revival. That sort of 306 THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST 307 thing would corral their sympathies, the showman said. "There was a big audience that night-mostly middle-aged and old people who belong to the church, and took a strong interest in Bible matters, and the balance were pretty much young bucks and heifers- they always come out strong on panoramas, you know, because it gives them a chance to taste one another's complexions in the dark. "Well, the showman began to swell himself up for his lecture, and the old mud-dobber tackled the piano and ran his fingers up and down once or twice to see that she was all right, and the fellows behind the curtain commenced to grind out the panorama. The showman balanced his weight on his right foot, and propped his hands over his hips, and flung his eyes over his shoulder at the scenery, and said— "Ladies and gentlemen, the painting now before you illustrates the beautiful and touching parable of the Prodigal Son. Observe the happy expression just breaking over the features of the poor, suffering youth-so worn and weary with his long march; note also the ecstasy beaming upon the uplifted counte- nance of the aged father, and the joy that sparkles in the eyes of the excited group of youths and maidens, and seems ready to burst into the welcom- ing chorus from their lips. The lesson, my friends, is as solemn and instructive as the story is tender and beautiful.' "The mud-dobber was all ready, and when the second speech was finished, struck up- ***. 308 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES (6 'Oh, we'll all get blind drunk, When Johnny comes marching home!' "Some of the people giggled, and some groaned a little. The showman couldn't say a word; he looked at the pianist sharp, but he was all lovely and serene -he didn't know there was anything out of gear. "The panorama moved on, and the showman drummed up his grit and started in fresh. "Ladies and gentlemen, the fine picture now un- folding itself to your gaze exhibits one of the most notable events in Bible history-our Saviour and His disciples upon the Sea of Galilee. How grand, how awe-inspiring are the reflections which the subject invokes? What sublimity of faith is revealed to us in this lesson from the sacred writings? The Saviour rebukes the angry waves, and walks securely upon the bosom of the deep!' "All around the house they were whispering, 'Oh, how lovely, how beautiful!' and the orchestra let himself out again- "A life on the ocean wave, And a home on the rolling deep!' "There was a good deal of honest snickering turned on this time and considerable groaning, and one or two old deacons got up and went out. The showman grated his teeth, and cursed the piano man to him- self; but the fellow sat there like a knot on a log, and seemed to think he was doing first-rate. "After things got quiet the showman thought he would make one more stagger at it any way, though THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST 309 î his confidence was beginning to get mighty shaky. The supes started the panorama grinding along again, and he says- "Ladies and gentlemen, this exquisite painting represents the raising of Lazarus from the dead by our Saviour. The subject has been handled with marvelous skill by the artist, and such touching sweetness and tenderness of expression has he thrown into it that I have known peculiarly sensitive per- sons to be even affected to tears by looking at it. Observe the half-confused, half-inquiring look upon the countenance of the awakened Lazaras. Observe, also, the attitude and expression of the Saviour, who takes him gently by the sleeve of his shroud with one hand, while He points with the other towards the distant city.' "Before anybody could get off an opinion in the case the innocent old ass at the piano struck up— "Come rise up, William Ri-i-ley, And go along with me!' "Whe-ew! All the solemn old flats got up in a huff to go, and everybody else laughed till the windows. rattled. "The showman went down and grabbed the orches- tra and shook him up and says- "That lets you out, you know, you chowder- headed old clam: Go to the door-keeper and get your money, and cut your stick-vamose the ranche! Ladies and gentlemen, circumstances over which I have no control compel me prematurely to dismiss the house."" MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Running for Governor. A FEW months ago I was nominated for Gov- ernor of the great State of New York, to run against Mr. John T. Smith and Mr. Blank J. Blank on an independent ticket. I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage over these gentlemen, and that was-good character. It was easy to see by the newspapers that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good name, that time had gone by. It was plain that in these latter years they had be- come familiar with all manner of shameful crimes. But at the very moment that I was exalting my advantage and joying in it in secret, there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort "riling" the deeps of my happiness, and that was-the having to hear my name bandied about in familiar connection with those of such people. I grew more and more dis- turbed. Finally I wrote my grandmother about it. Her answer came quick and sharp. She said- "You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed of-not one. Look at the newspapers-look at them and comprehend what sort of characters Messrs. Smith and Blank 310 RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR 311 are, and then see if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a public canvass with them." It was my very thought! I did not sleep a single moment that night. But after all I could not recede. I was fully committed, and must go on with the fight. As I was looking listlessly over the papers at breakfast I came across this paragraph, and I may truly say I never was so confounded before. “PERJURY.—Perhaps, now that Mr. Mark Twain is before the people as a candidate for Governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses in Wakawak, Chochin China, in 1863; the intent of which perjury being to rob a poor native widow and her helpless family of a meagre plantain-patch, their only stay and support in their be- reavement and desolation. Mr. Twain owes it to himself, as well as to the great people whose suffrages he asks, to clear this mat- terup. Will he do it?" I thought I should burst with amazement! Such a cruel, heartless charge. I never had seen Cochin China! I never had heard of Wakawak! I didn't know a plantain-patch from a kangaroo! I did not know what to do. I was crazed and helpless. I let the day slip away without doing anything at all. The next morning the same paper had this—nothing more :- “SIGNIFICANT.—Mr. Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively silent about the Cochin China perjury." [Mem.-During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to me in any other way than as "the infamous perjurer Twain."] 312 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES Next came the Gazette, with this:- “Wanted to KNOW.-Will the new candidate for Governor deign to explain to certain of his fellow-citizens (who are suffering to vote for him!) the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Mon- tana losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his 'trunk' (newspaper he rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to give him a friendly admonition for his own good, and so tarred and feathered him, and rode him on a rail, and then advised him to leave a permanent vacuum in the place he usually occupied in the camp. Will he do this?” Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that? For I never was in Montana in my life. [After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as "Twain, the Montana Thief."] I got to picking up papers apprehensively-much as one would lift a desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it. One day this met my eye:- "THE LIE NAILED!-By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flan- agan, Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr. Snub Rafferty and Mr. Catty Mulligan, of Water Street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-bearer, Blank J. Blank, was hanged for highway rob- bery, is a brutal and gratuitous LIE, without a shadow of founda- tion in fact. It is disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their graves. and defiling their honored names with slander. When we think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the innocent relatives and friends of the de- ceased, we are almost driven to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful vengeance upon the traducer. RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR 313 But no! let us leave him to the agony of a lacerated conscience (though if passion should get the better of the public, and in its blind fury they should do the traducer bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict and no court punish the per- petrators of the deed)." The ingenious closing sentence had the effect of moving me out of bed with despatch that night, and out at the back door also, while the "outraged and insulted public" surged in the front way, breaking furniture and windows in their righteous indignation as they came, and taking off such property as they could carry when they went. And yet I can lay my hand upon the Book and say that I never slandered Mr. Blank's grandfather. More: I had never even heard of him or mentioned him up to that day and date. [I will state, in passing, that the journal above quoted from always referred to me afterward as "Twain, the Body-Snatcher."] The next newspaper article that attracted my at- tention was the following:- "A SWEET CANDIDATE.-Mr. Mark Twain, who was to make such a blighting speech at the mass meeting of the Independents last night, didn't come to time! A telegram from his physician stated that he had been knocked down by a runaway team, and his leg broken in two places-sufferer lying in great agony, and so forth, and so forth, and a lot more bosh of the same sort. And the Inde- pendents tried hard to swallow the wretched subterfuge, and pre- tend that they did not know what was the real reason of the absence of the abandoned creature whom they denominate their standard-bearer. A certain man was seen to reel into Mr. Twain's N 314 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES hotel last night in a state of beastly intoxication. It is the imper- ative duty of the Independents to prove that this besotted brute was not Mark Twain himself. We have them at last! This is a case that admits of no shirking. The voice of the people demands in thunder-tones, 'WHO WAS THAT MAN?' " It was incredible, absolutely incredible, for a moment, that it was really my name that was coupled with this disgraceful suspicion. Three long years had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine, or liquor of any kind. [It shows what effect the times were having on me when I say that I saw myself confidently dubbed "Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain" in the next issue of that journal without a pang-notwithstanding I knew that with monotonous fidelity the paper would go on calling me so to the very end.] By this time anonymous letters were getting to be an important part of my mail matter. This form was common- "How about that old woman you kiked off your premises which was beging. POL PRY." And this- "There is things which you have done which is unbeknowens to anybody but me. You better trot out a few dols. to yours truly, or you'll hear thro' the papers from HANDY ANDY." This is about the idea. I could continue them till the reader was surfeited, if desirable. Shortly the principal Republican journal "con- victed" me of wholesale bribery, and the leading Democratic paper "nailed" an aggravated case of blackmailing to me. RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR 315 [In this way I acquired two additional names: "Twain the Filthy Corruptionist," and "Twain the Loathsome Embracer."] By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an "answer" to all the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any longer. As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following appeared in one of the papers the very next day:- "BEHOLD THE MAN!-The independent candidate still maintains silence. Because he dare not speak. Every accusation against him has been amply proved, and they have been endorsed and re- endorsed by his own eloquent silence, till at this day he stands forever convicted. Look upon your candidate, Independents! Look upon the Infamous Perjurer! the Montana Thief! the Body- Snatcher! Contemplate your incarnate Delirium Tremens! your Filthy Corruptionist! your Loathsome Embracer! Gaze upon him-ponder him well-and then say if you can give your honest votes to a creature who has earned this dismal array of titles by his hideous crimes, and dare not open his mouth in denial of any one of them !" There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so in deep humiliation, I set about preparing to "answer" a mass of baseless charges and mean and wicked falsehoods. But I never finished the task, for the very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity, and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all it inmates, because it obstructed the view from my house. This 316 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES threw me into a sort of panic. Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened. This drove me to the verge of distraction. On top of this I was accused of employing toothless and in- competent old relatives to prepare the food for the foundling hospital when I was warden. I was wav- ering-wavering. And at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children, of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness, were taught to rush on to the platform at a public meeting, and clasp me around the legs and call me PA! I gave it up. I hauled down my colors and sur- rendered. I was not equal to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the State of New York, and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of spirit signed it, "Truly yours, once a decent man, but now MARK TWAIN, I. P., M. T., B, S., D. T., F. C., and L. E." 5 To renew the charge, book must be brought to the desk. MAR 12 1979 1 DATE DUE X EBML T A Birth UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 3 9015 03357 8165 play a major men det gode apest k bad met koe de Mightietan egin gen Plum e 2 Sagatur f PRATS [*** C