.\ sed, xk GA aN ROCKFORD :::- CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Gift of SAMUEL B. Birp ’21 Cornell University The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022085991 ik as os : | s aN MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES, NEW AND OLD. by Shin wel Langhdrne Tlemens NOW FIRST PUBLISHED IN COMPLETE FORM. SOLD ONLY BY SUBSCRIPTION. pnremniy ABLE q THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY. HARTFORD, CONN., AND CHICAGO, ILL. 1887, ENTERED according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, PREFACE. I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never been in print before, (such as “Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls,” the “Jumping Frog restored to the English tongue after martyrdom in the French,” the “ Membranous Croup ” sketch, and many others which I need not specify): not doing this in order to make an advertisement of it, but because these things seemed instructive. Marx Twaw. Hartrorp, 1875. ITN DHX. ag My Warcu—An Instructive Littte Tats, 3 - e PouiricaL Economy, . 7 . ‘i : 7 Tue Jumpine Froe, a . : . . . JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE, . . ° . 5 Story or tHe Bap Littte Boy, . ; : ' Story oF THE Goop LittLez Boy, . a 5 5 Two Porms—By Moorr anp Twain, +. . 3 A Visit TO NraGaRA, .« 5 . . . z ANSWERS TO CoRRESPONDENTS, . . i ‘ 5 To Raise Pouttry, . ° c 5 . . Tue EXPERIENCES OF THE MCWILLIAMSES WITH MemBRANOUS CRoUP, My First Literary VENTURE, ‘ . : . How rue Autuor was Soup 1n Newars, ‘: 3 ‘ Tue Orrice Bore, ‘ - 7 ‘ z : JOHNNY GREER,. . . . és F . Tue Facts tn THE Cast oF THE Great Beer ContTRACct, z Tue Facts 1n THE CasE OF GEORGE FisHER, DECEASED, « F DIsGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A Boy, . . a é Tux Juper’s ‘t Sprrnirep Woman,” « : = ‘ INFORMATION WANTED, . 3 a : 5 a Some Fasies ror Goop Op Boys anp Girts, Part First, . ce “cc “ce ce ce Part SEconpD, iid ce ce its ce Part THIRD, Ps Tue Facts Concernine THE Late SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP, A Fasuion Irem, . : . . . . 7 RitEY—NeEwsPaPeR CORRESPONDENT, - 3 - 2 A Fine Otp May, . . < s 3 ; , Scrence vs. Luck, ‘ ‘ 5 js é é Tue Kitiine or Jutius Casar Locarizep, 3 . P An IrsmM WHICH THE EDITOR HIMSELF COULD NOT UNDERSTAND, INDEX. Tue Winow's Protest, é a F : 5 ‘ s 3 - 166 A MeEpievat Romance, ‘ ‘ 3 a 3 2 ‘i ‘ A 171 Petition Concerninc Copyricut, . . : : 3 5 3 . 179 Arter-Dinner SPEECH, . ‘ 2 r F 2 7 3 : 180 Lionizinc Murperers, 3 eae : . 4 : A A . 182 A New Crime, . c 3 i 5 5 7 ‘ . é 187 A Curtous Dream, 7 . 7 : 3 ‘ ‘ F - - 192 A Tous Srory Just as I Hearp It, . F é < . 3 2 : 202 Personat Hasits or THe Siamese Twins, : fe he 3 : ; . 208 Sregcu at THe ScortisH Banquet at Lonvon, : : ‘cl, ef : ‘ 213 A Guost Srory, a oe > 7 = . ; ; ; . 215 LeGeNp oF THE CAPITOLINE VENUS, . 3 e.g : é 4 229 Sprsce on Accipent InspRance, ‘ re ee . : : . 229 Joun Cainaman in New York, 2 , ; : ; : : 3 231 How I once Epitep AN AGRICULTURAL PapeR, . | . ‘ é F ‘ - 233 Tue PerririzpD Man, . : ‘ 3 5 : é ‘ i ‘ 239 My Bioopy Massacre, . : ‘ e 5 zi ‘ “, é « 243 Tae Unpertaker’s CHAT, 7 . 5 2 : 5 9 % : 247 ConceRNING CHAMBERMAIDS, : F i q 5 , - . » 250 <¢ AFTER” JENKINS, é j ; 3 : - z F 3 256 Avgetia’s Unrortunate Youne Man, . F : - : ‘ $ - 253 Apour Barsers, - . 3 : ‘ 3 és , ‘ 257 «¢ Party Crizs” 1n IRELAND, ; . c c C ‘ 5 - 262 Tue Facts ConcERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION, « 7 : 5 . 7 264 History Repeats Itsecr, . F : . ‘ . ‘: é; » 271 Hownorep as A Curiosity, " i é : A a. é . . 273 Tae Late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, . ‘ ‘ ‘4 Z % ‘ é ~ ye THe “ Burnp LETTER” DEPpaRTMENT, Lonpon P. O., : . é , : 279 First Inrerview witn ArTEmMusS Warp, 6 eo é . F « 288 CANNIBALISM IN TIE CARS, . i 3 5 3 ‘ ‘ i ‘ 287 Tue ScripTuRAL PANORAMIST, - ‘: 5 a ‘ 3 ‘ é . 296 From “Hosritat Days,” .- ; s : : : 299 Curine a Cotp, if é F ‘ (= : 3 - 309 A Curious PLEASURE EXCURSION, .« ‘ : ‘ s B ° 804 Rowninc FoR GOVERNOR, . § . - ‘ i . . 31k A MysrTeExious VISIT, . Le . . . . . 316 WA. iP mas . 4) OP POT Rh 4g = : ie ba ‘ye \ " *s, \ Lia MY WATCH. AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE, | Y beautiful new watch had run ‘ eighteen months without los- ing or gaining, and without h breaking any part of its machinery or y) stopping. I had come to believe it YAH “fe. infallible in its judgments about the ine = time of day, and to consider its con- jan ay stitution and its anatomy imperisha- —— ble. But at last, one night, I let it = ‘ run down. JI grieved about it as if it i |e SS “ yy} Wwerea recognized messenger and fore- — wt runner of calamity. But by-and-by I cheered up, set the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart. Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler’s to set it by the exact 2 . 17 18 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. time, and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to set it forme. Then he said, “She is four minutes slow—regulator wants pushing up.” I tried to stop him—tried to make him understand that the watch kept per- fect time. But no; all this human cabbage could see was that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed. My watch began to gain. It gained faster and faster day by day. Within the week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse - dred and fifty in the of two months it went upto a hun- shade. At the end had left all the town far in the timepieces of the rear,and was a teen days ahead of fraction over thir- the almanac. It was away into No- vember enjoying the snow, while the were still turning, rent, bills payable, October leaves It hurried up house such a ruinous way abide it. I took it to be regulated. He and such things, in that I could not to the watchmaker asked me if I had paired. I said no, ever had it re- it had neverneeded. looked a look of and eagerly pried any repairing. He vicious happiness the watch open, and then put a small dice box into his eye and peered into its. machinery. He said it wanted cleaning and oiling, besides regulating—come in a week. After being cleaned and oiled, and regulated, my watch slowed down to: that degree that it ticked like a tolling bell. I began to be left by trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch strung out three days’ grace to four and let me go to protest; I gradually drifted back into yesterday, then day before, then into last week, and by-and-by the comprehension came upon me that all solitary and alone I was lingering along in week before last, and the AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE. 19 world was out of sight. I seemed to detect in myself a sort of sneaking fellow- feeling for the mummy in the museum, and a desire to swap news with him. I went to a watchmaker again. He took the watch all to pieces while I waited, and then said the barrel was “swelled.” He said he could reduce it in three days. After this the watch averaged well, but nothing more. For half a day it would go like the very mischief, and keep up such a barking and wheezing, and whooping and. sneezing and snorting, that I could not hear myself think for the disturbance; and. as long as it held out there was not a watch in the land that stood any chance- test of the day it: againstit. But the would keep on nn I | | AANA | | k slowing down and: fooling along until all iI ual | Th, all the clocks it had left behind | HT i | EE | caught up again, So at last, at the il : ! | end of twenty-four hours, it would trot Gis * i up to the judges’ stand all right and Dice Cee ae just in time. It would show a fair Ch and square aver- age, and no man could say it had done more or less a correct average is in a watch, and I ment to another said the kingbolt I was glad it was To tell the no idea what the ous. did not choose to appear ignorant to a stranger. than its duty. But only a mild virtue: took this instru- watchmaker. He- was broken. Isaid: nothing more seri~ plain truth, I hadi kingbolt was, but Ii He repaired the kingbolt, but: what the watch gained in one way it lost in another. It would run awhile and them stop awhile, and then run awhile again, and so on, using its own discretion about the intervals. my breast for a few days, but finally took the watch to another watchmaker. And every time it went off it kicked back like a musket. I padded He picked it all to pieces, and turned the ruin over and over under his glass; and then he said there appeared to be something the matter with the hair-trigger. He 20 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. fixed it, and gave it a fresh start. It did well now, except that always at ten minutes to ten the hands would shut together like a pair of scissors, and from that time forth they would travel together. The oldest man in the world could not make head or tail of the time of day by such a watch, and so I went again to have the thing repaired. This person said that the crystal had got bent, and that the main- spring was not straight. He also remarked that part of the works needed half- soling. Ife made these things all right, and then my timepiece performed unex- ceptionably, save that now and then, after working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate spider’s web over the face of the watch. She would reel off the next twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang. I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he took her to pieces. Then I prepared to cross-question him rigidly, for this thing was getting serious. The watch had cost two hundred dollars originally, and I seemed to have paid out two or three thousand for repairs. While I waited and looked on I presently recognized in this watchmaker an old acquaintance—a steamboat engineer of other days, and not a good engineer either. He examined all the parts carefully, just as the other watchmakers had done, and then delivered his verdict with the same confidence of manner. He said— “She makes too much steam—you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the safety-valve!” I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense. My uncle William (now deceased, alas!) used to say that a good horse was a good horse until it had run away once, and that a good watch was a good watch until the repairers got a chance at it. And he used to wonder what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers, and engineers, and blacksmiths ; but nobody could ever tell him, N RS , TONG | eee LAL a DUTIGAL ECONOMY, Political Econemy is the basis of all good government. The wisest men of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the—., ‘(Here I was interrupted and in- formed that a stranger wished to see me down at the door. I went,and con- fronted him, and asked to know his business, struggling all the time to keep a tight rein on my seething political economy ideas, and not let them break away from me or get tangled in their harness. And privately I wished the stranger was in the bottom of the canal with a cargo of wheat on top of him. I was all in a fever, but he was cool, 21 He said he was sorry to disturb me, but 22 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. as he was passing he noticed that I needed some lightning-rods. I said, “‘ Yes, yes— go on—what about it?”” He said there was nothing about it, in particular—nothing except that he would like to put them upforme. I am new to housekeeping; have been used to hotels and boarding-houses all my life. Like anybody else of similar experience, I try to appear (to strangers) to be an old housekeeper; consequently I said in an off-hand way that I had been intending for some time to have six or The stranger started, and looked inquiringly eight lightning-rods put up, but at me, but I was serene. I thought that if I chanced to make any mistakes, he would not catch me by my countenance. He said he would rather have my custom than any man’s in town. I said, “All right,” and started off to wrestle with my great subject again, when he called me back and said it would be necessary to know exactly how many “ points’ I wanted put up, what parts of the house I wanted them on, and what quality of rod I preferred. It was close quarters for a man not used to the exigencies of housekeeping; but I went through creditably, and he probably never suspected that I wasanovice. I told him to put up eight “ points,” and put them all on the roof, and use the best cuality of rod. He said he could furnish the “plain” article at 20 cents a foot; “coppered,” 25 cents; “ zinc-plated spiral-twist,” at 30 cents, that would stop a streak of lightning any time, no matter where it was bound, and “render its errand harmless and its further progress apocryphal.” I said apocryphal was no slouch of a word, emanating from the source it did, but, philology aside, I liked the spiral-twist and would take that brand. Then he said he cou/d make two hundred and fifty feet answer; but to do it right, and make the best job in town of it, and attract the admiration of the just and the unjust alike, and compel all parties to say they never saw a more symmetrical and hypothetical display of lightning-rods since they were born, he supposed he really couldn’t get along without four hundred, though he was not vindictive, and trusted he was willing to try. I said, go ahead and use four hundred, and make any kind of a job he pleased out of it, but let me get back to my work. So I got rid of him at last; and now, after half-an-hour spent in getting my train of political economy thoughts coupled together again, I am ready to go on once more. | richest treasures of their genius, their experience of life, and their learning. The great lights of commercial jurisprudence, international confraternity, and biological deviation, of all ages, all civilizations, and all nationalities, from Zoroaster down to Horace Greeley, have—— POLITICAL ECONOMY. 23 [Here I was interrupted again, and required to go down and confer further with that lightning-rod man. I hurried off, boiling and surging with prodigious thoughts wombed in words of such majesty that each one of them was in itself a straggling procession of syllables that might be fifteen minutes passing a given point, and once more I confronted him—he so calm and sweet, I so hot and frenzied. He was standing in the contemplative attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on my infant tuberose, and the other among my pansies, his hands on his hips, his hat-brim tilted forward, one eye shut and the other gazing critically and admiringly in the direction of my principal chimney. He said now ¢here was a state of things to make a man glad to be alive; and added, “I leave it to you if you ever saw any- thing more deliriously picturesque than eight lightning-rods on one chimney?” I said I had no present recollection of anything that transcended it. He said that in his opinion nothing on earth but Niagara Falls was superior to it in the way of natural scenery. All that was needed now, he verily believed, to make my house a perfect balm to the eye, was to kind of touch up the other chimneys a little, and thus “add to the generous coup d’ail a soothing uniformity of achievement which would allay the excitement naturally consequent upon the first coup a’état.” I asked him if he learned to talk out of a book, and if I could borrow it anywhere? He smiled pleasantly, and said that his manner of speaking was not taught in books, and that nothing but familiarity with lightning could enable a man to handle his conversational style with impunity. He then figured up an estimate, and said that about eight more rods scattered about my roof would about fix me right, and he guessed five hundred feet of stuff would do it; and added that the first eight had got a little the start of him, so to speak, and used up a mere trifle of material more than he had calculated on—a hundred feet or along there. I said I was in a dreadful hurry, and I wished we could get this business permanently mapped out, so that I could go on with my work. He said, “I could have put up those eight rods, and marched off about my business—some men wou/d have done it. But no: I said to myself, this man is a stranger to me, and I will die before I’ll wrong him; there ain’t lightning-rods enough on that house, and for one I’ll never stir out of my tracks till I’ve done as I would be done by, and told him so. Stranger, my duty is accomplished ; if the recalcitrant and dephlogistic messenger of heaven strikes ‘ 24 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. your’”’—— “There, now, there,” I said, “ put on the other eight—add five hundred feet of spiral-twist—do anything and everything you want to do; but calm your sufferings, and try to keep your feelings where you can reach them with the dic- tionary. Meanwhile, if we understand each other now, I will go to work again.” I think I have been sitting here a full hour, this time, trying to get back to where I was when my train of thought was broken up by the last interruption ; but I believe I have accomplished it at last, and may venture to proceed again. | wrestled with this great subject, and the greatest among them have found it a worthy adversary, and one that always comes up fresh and smiling after every throw. The great Confucius said that he would rather be a profound political economist than chief of police, Cicero frequently said that political economy was the grandest consummation that thc human mind was capable of consuming ; and even our own Greeley has said vaguely but forcibly that ‘ Political [Here the lightning-rod man sent up another call for me. I went down ina state of mind bordering on impatience. He said he would rather have died than interrupt me, but when he was employed to do a job, and that job was expected to be done in a clean, workmanlike manner, and when it was finished and fatigue urged him to seek the rest and recreation he stood so much in need of, and he was about to do it, but looked up and saw at a glance that all the calculations had been a little out, and if a thunder storm were to come up, and that house, which he felt a personal interest in, stood there with nothing on earth to protect it but sixteen lightning-rods “Let us have peace!” I shrieked. ‘Put up a hundred and fifty! Put some on the kitchen! Putadozen onthe barn! Put a couple on the cow !—Put one on the cook !—scatter them all over the persecuted place till it looks like a zinc-plated, spiral-twisted, silver-mounted cane-break! Move! Use up all the material you can get your hands on, and when you run out of lightning- rods put up ram-rods, cam-rods, stair-rods, piston-rods—azything that will pander to your dismal appetite for artificial scenery, and bring respite to my raging brain and healing to my lacerated soul!” Wholly unmoved—further than to smile sweetly—this iron being simply turned back his wristbands daintily, and said “He would now proceed to hump himself.” Well, all that was nearly three hours ago. It is questionable whether I am calm enough yet to write on the noble theme of political economy, but I cannot resist the desire to try, for it is the one subject that POLITICAL ECONOMY. 25 is nearest to my heart and dearest to my brain of all this world’s philosophy.] a econonry is heaven’s best boon to man.’ When the loose but gifted Byron lay in his Venetian exile he observed that, if it could be granted him to go back and live his misspent life over again, he would give his lucid and unintoxicated intervals to the composition, not of frivolous rhymes, but of essays upon political economy. Washington loved this exquisite science ; such names as Baker, Beckwith, Judson, Smith, are imperishably linked with it; and even imperial Homer, in the ninth book of the Iliad, has said :— * Fiat justitia, ruat ccelum, Post mortem unum, ante bellum, Hic jacet hoc, ex-parte res, Politicum e-conomico est. The grandeur of these conceptions of the old poet, together with the felicity of the wording which clothes them, and the sublimity of the imagery whereby they are illustrated, have singled out that stanza, and made it more celebrated than any that ever [“Now, not a word out of you—not a single word. Just state your bill and relapse into impenetrable silence for ever and ever on these premises. Nine hundred dollars? Is that all? This check for the amount will be honored at any respectable bank in America. What is that multitude of people gathered in the ~street for? How ?—‘ looking at the lightning-rods!’ Bless my life, did they never see any lightning-rods before? Never saw ‘such a stack of them on one establish- ment,’ did I understand you to say? I will step down and critically observe this popular ebullition of ignorance.” ] Turee Days LATER.—We are all about worn out. For four-and-twenty hours our bristling premises were the talk and wonder of the town. The theatres lan- guished, for their happiest scenic inventions were tame and commonplace compared with my lightning-rods. Our street was blocked night and day with spectators, and among them were many who came from the country to see. It was a blessed relief on the second day, when a thunder-storm came up and the lightning began to“ go for’ my house, as the historian Josephus quaintly phrases it. It cleared the gal- leries, so to speak. In five minutes there was not a spectator within half a mile of my place; but all the high houses about that distance away were full, windows, roof, and all And well they might be, for all the falling stars and Fourth-of-July 26 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. fireworks of a generation, put together and rained down simultaneously out of heaven in one brilliant shower upon one helpless roof, would not have any advan- tage of the pyrotechnic display that was making my house so magnificently con- spicuous in the general gloom of the storm. By actual count, the lightning struck’ at my establishment seven hundred and sixty-four times in forty minutes, but tripped on one of those faithful rods every time, and slid down the spiral twist and shot into the earth before it probably had time to be surprised at the way the thing was done. And through all that bombardment only one patch of slates was ripped up, and that was because, for a single instant, the rods in the vicinity were trans- porting all the lightning they could possibly accommodate. Well, nothing was ever seen like it since the world began. For one whole day and night not a member POLITICAL ECONOMY. 27 of my family stuck his head out of the window but he got the hair snatched off it as smooth as a billiard-ball; and if the reader will believe me, not one of us ever dreamt of stirring abroad. But at last the awful siege came to an end—because there was absolutely no more electricity left in the clouds above us within grappling distance of my insatiable rods. Then I sallied forth, and gathered daring workmen together, and not a bite or a nap did we take till the premises were utterly stripped of all their terrific armament except just three rods on the house, one on the kitchen, and one on the barn—and behold these remain there even unto this day. And then, and not till then, the people ventured to use our street again. I will remark here, in passing, that during that fearful time I did not continue my essay upon political economy. Iam not even yet settled enough in nerve and. brain, to resume it. To Wuomir May Concern.—Parties having need of three thousand two hundred and eleven feet of best quality zinc-plated spiral-twist lightning-rod stuff, and sixteen hundred and thirty-one silver-tipped points, all in tolerable repair (and, although much worn by use, still equal to any ordinary emergency), can hear of a- bargain by addressing the publisher. an S SWS ee ay | Wy} NO Fa pee vincetare ce Mondes" (Review of Some Tw THE “JUMPING FROG.” IN ENGLIFH. THEN IN FRENCH. THEN CLAWED BACK INTO A CIVILIZED LANGUAGE ONCE MORE BY PATIENT, UNRENUMERATED TOIL. VEN a criminal is entitled ; } to fair play; and certainly 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 o Worlds), wherein the writer treats of “ Les Humoristes Americaines” (These Humorists Americans). I am one of these 28 THE ¥UMPING FROS. 29 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 everything to that degree that when you start into a sen- tence you never know. whether you are going to come out alive or not). Itisa 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 straightway 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 likea meridian of longitude. But my mere assertion is not proof; wherefore I print the French version, that all may see that I do not speak falsely ; furthermore, in order that cven the unlettered may know my injury and give me their compas- sion, 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, though not fast, I being self-educated. I ask the reader to run his eye over the original English version of the Jumping Frog, and then read the French or my re-translation, 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 purpose. Without further introduction, the Jumping Frog, as I originally wrote it, was as follows—[after it will be found the French version, and after the latter 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 * Pronounced Cal-e-va-ras, 30 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 Conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Ft 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 tranquil countenance, and gave me good-day. about a cherished boyhood named Le- Rev. Leondias W. minister of the Gos- heard was at one Angel’s Camp. I Wheeler could tell this Rev. Leonidas feel under many ob- Simon Wheeler corner and_block- his chair, and then off the monotonous lows this paragraph. never frowned, he voice from the gen- which he tuned his never betrayed the enthusiasm ; but all inable narrative impressive earnest- Q He roused up, I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries LE AR vote 4, Sil NA % wes NY | OXY om SRE ie, e, Key SS ees : S SS Ni \ SN companion of his ondias W. Smiley— Smiley, a young pel, who he had time a resident of added that if Mr. me anything about W. Smiley, I would ligations to him. backed me into a aded me there with sat down and reeled narrative which fol- He never smiled, he never changed his tle-flowing key, to initial sentence, he slightest suspicion of through the interm- there ran a vein of ness 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 /ixesse. once. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him “Rev. Leonidas W. H’m, Reverend Le—well, there was a feller here once by the name of Fim Smiley, in the winter of ’49—or may be it was the spring of ’50—I don’t recollect exactly, some- how, though what makes me think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume: THE F$UMPING FROG. 31 warn't finished when he first come to the camp ; but any way, he was the curiosest man about al- ways betting on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side ; and if he couldn’t he’d change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit Aim— any way just so’s he got a bet, Ae was satisfied. But still he was lucky, uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner. He was always ready and laying for a chance; there couldn’t be no soli« try 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 fly a camp-meeting, he to bet on Parson Walk- to be the best exhort- he was too, and a good a straddle-bug start to would bet you how him to get to—to ing to, and if you took ler that straddle-bug would find out where how long he was on boys here has seen tell you about him. no difference to him thing —the dangdest er’s wife laid very while, and it seemed to save her; but one first ; or if there was would be there reg’lar er, which he judged er about here, and so man. If he even see go anywheres, he long it would take wherever he was go~ him up, he would fol- to Mexico but what he he was bound for and the road. Lots of the that Smiley, and can Why, it never made —he’d bet on any feller. Parson Walk- sick once, for a good as if they warn’t going morning he come in, and Smiley 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 resk 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 distemper, or the consumption, or some- thing 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 32 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. sometimes 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 fora 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 satisfied, 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 jint of his hind leg and freeze to it—not chaw, 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 harnessed a dog once that did’nt 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 give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was Azs 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 them kind of things, till you couldn’t rest, and you couldn’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 Web- ster was 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 offn the counter there, and flop down on the floor ag’in as / THE JUMPING FROG. 33 solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as 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 understand ; and when it tome 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, cand 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.” 3 34 MARK TWAIN’S SKETCHES. 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 Ae 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, and maybe you ain’t only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I’ve got my opinion and I'll resk 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 J 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 alongside of Dan’l, with his fore-paws just even with Dan'l’s, and T'll give the word.” Then he says, “One—two—three—gi¢/” 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 idca 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 “7 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, “JI do wonder what in the nation that frog throw’d 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 weigh five pound !” 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—he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketched him. And i [Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was. THE FUMPING FROG, 35 Eo “ yy UY Bed yale A IILLLA SL Ad LM GA oy WOeeZ wanted.J] 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.” But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Fim 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. Now let the learned look upon this picture and say if iconoclasm can further go: [From the Revue des Deux Mondes, of July 15th, 1872.] LA GRENOUILLE SANTEUSE DU COMTE DE CALAVERAS. *—Il y avait une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim Smiley: c’était dans Phiver de 49, peut-étre bien au printemps de 50, je ne me rappelle pas exactement. Ce qui me fait croire que 36 MARK TWAIN’S SKETCHES. & c’était l'un ou l'autre, c’est que je me souviens que le grand bief n’était pas achevé lorsqu’il arriva au camp pour la premi¢re fois, mais de toutes facons il était "homme le plus friand de paris qui se pit voir, pariant sur tout ce qui se présentait, quand il pouvait trouver un adversaire, et, quand il n’en trouvait pas il passait du cété opposé. Tout ce qui convenait 4 l'autre lui convenait ; pourvu qu'il edt un pari, Smiley était satisfait. Et il avait une chance! une chance inouie ; presque toujours il gagnait. I] faut dire qu’il était toujours prét a s’ exposer, qu’ on ne pouvait mentionner la moindre chose sans que ce gaillard offrit de parier la-dessus n'importe quoi et de prendre le cété que l’on voudrait, comme je vous le disais tout a l'heure. S'il y avait des courses, vous le trouviez riche ou ruiné a la fin; s’il y avait un combat de chiens, il apportait son enjeu ; il l’apportait pour un combat de chats, pour un combat de coqs ;—parbleu ! si vous aviez vu deux oiseaux sur une haie, il vous aurait offert de parier lequel s’envolerait le premier, et, s’il y avait meeting au camp, il venait parier ‘réguligrement pour le curé Walker, qu’il jugeait étre le meilleur prédicateur des environs, et qui Yétait en effet, et un brave homme. II aurait rencontré une punaise de bois en chemin, qu'il aurait parié sur le temps qu'il lui faudrait pour aller ott elle voudrait aller, et, si vous l'aviez pris au mot, il aurait suivi la punaise jusqu’au Mexique, sans se soucier d’aller si loin, ni du temps qu’il y perdrait. Une fois la femme du curé Walker fut trés malade pendant longtemps, il semblait qu’on ne la sauverait pas; mais un matin le curé agrive, et Smiley lui demande comment elle va, et il dit qu’elle est bien mieux, grace a l’infinie miséricorde, tellement mieux qu’avec la bénédiciion de la Provi- dence elle s’en tirerait, et voila que, sans y penser, Smiley répond :—Eh bien ! je gage deux et demi qu'elle mourra tout de méme. “Ce Smiley avait une jument que les gars appelaient le bidet du quart d’heure, mais seulement pour plaisanter, vous comprenez, parce que, bien entendu, elle était plus vite que ya! Et il avait coutume de gagner de l’argent avec cette béte, quoiqu’elle fit poussive, cornarde, toujours prise d’asthme, de coliques ou de consomption, ou de quelque chose d’approchant. On lui donnait 2 ou 300 yards au départ, puis on la dépassait sans peine ; mais jamais 4 la fin elle ne manquait de s’échauffer, de s’exaspérer, et elle arrivait, s’écartant, se défendant, ses jambes gréles en l’air devant les obstacles, quelquefois les évitant et faisant avec cela plus de poussiére qu’aucun cheval, plus de bruit surtout avec ses éternumens et reniflemens,—crac ! elle arrivait donc toujours premiére d’une téte, aussi juste qu’on peut le mesurer. Et il avait un petit bouledogue qui, 4 le voir, ne valait pas un sou ; on aurait cru que parier contre lui c’était voler, tant il était ordinaire ; mais aussitét les enjeux faits, il devenait un autre chien. Sa machoire inférieure commengait 4 ressortir comme un gaillard d’avant, ses dents se découvraient brillantes comme des fournaises, et un chien pouvait le taquiner, l’exciter, le mordre, le jeter deux ou trois fois par-dessus son épaule, André Jackson, c’était Ie nom du chien, André Jackson prenait cela tranquillement, comme s’il ne se fit jamais attendu 4 autre chose, et quand les paris étaient doublés et redoublés contre lui, il vous saisissait l’autre chien juste a l’articulation de la jambe de derriére, et il ne la lachait plus, non pas qu’il la machat, vous concevez, mais il s’y serait tenu pendu jusqu’a ce qu’on jetat l’éponge en lair, fallit-il attendre un THE FUMPING FROG. 37 .an. Smiley gagnait toujours avec cette béte-l4; malheureusement ils ont fini par dresser un chien qui n’avait pas de pattes de derriére, parce qu’on les avait sciées, et quand les choses furent au point qu’il voulait, et qu’il en vint a se jeter sur son morceau favori, le pauvre chien comprit en un instant qu'on s’était moqué de lui, et que l’autre le tenait. Vous n’avez jamais vu personne avoir lair plus penaud et plus découragé; il ne fit aucun effort pour gagner le combat et fut rudement secoud, de sorte que, regardant Smiley comme pour lui dire:—Mon cceur est brisé, c’est ta faute; pourquoi m’avoir livré 4 un chien qui n’a pas de pattes de derri€re, puisque cest par 14 que je les bats?— ils’en alla en clopinant, et se coucha pour mourir. Ah! c’était un bon chien, cect André Jackson, et il se serait fait un nom, s’il avait vécu, car il y avait de l’etoffe en lui, il avait du génie, je le sais, bien que de grandes occasions lui aient manqueé ; mais il est impossi- ble de supposer qu’un chien capable de se battre comme lui, certaines circonstances étant données, ait manqué de talent. Je mc sens triste toutes les fois que je pense 4 son dernier combat et au dénoiiment quilaeu. Eh bien! ce Smiley nourrissait des terriers 4 rats, et des cogs de combat, et des chats, et toute sorte de choses, au point qu'il était toujours en mesure de vous tenir téte, et qu’avec sa rage de paris on n’avait plus de repos. II! attrapa un jour une grenouille et l’empc~ta chez lui, disant qu’il prétendait faire son éducation ; vous me eroirez si vous voulez, mais pendant ‘rois mois il n’a rien fait que lui apprendre 4 sauter dans une cour retirée de sa maison. Et je vous réponds qu'il avait réussi. I] lui donnait, un petit coup par derri¢re, et l’instant d’aprés vous voyicz la grenouille tourner en air comme un beignet au-dessus de la poéle, faire une culbute, quelquefois deux, lorsqu’elle ¢ctait bein partic, et retomber sur ses pattes comme un chat. Il l’avait dressée dans l'art de gober des mouches, et l’'y exercait continuellement, si bien qu'une mouche, du plus loin qu’elle apparaissait, était une mouche perdue. Smiley avait coutume de dire que tout ce qui manquait 4 une grenouillc, c’était l'éducation, qu’avec ’éducation elle pouvait faire presque tout, et je le crois. Tenez, je ’ci vu poser Daniel Webster 14 sur ce plancher,—Daniel Webster était le nom de la grenouiile,— ct lui chanter :—Des mouches! Daniel, des mouches !—En un clin d’ceil, Danicl avait bondi ct saisi une mouche ici sur le comptoir, puis sauté de nouveau par terre, ol il restait vraiment 4 se grattcr la téte avec sa patte de derriére, comme s'il n’avait pas eu la moindre idée de sa supériorité. Jamais vous n’avez grenouille vu de aussi modeste, aussi naturelle, doude comme elle l’ctait! Et quand il s’agissait de sauter purement et simplement sur terrain plat, elle faisait plus de chemin en un saut qu’aucune béte de son espéce que vous puissiez con- naitre. Sauter 4 plat, c’¢tait son fort! Quand il s’agissait de cela, Smiley entassait les enjeux sur elle tant qu'il lui, restait un rowge liard. Il faut le reconnattre, Smiley était monstrueusement fier de sa grenouille, ct il en avait le droit, car des gens qui avaient voyagé, qui avaient tout vu, disaient qu’on lui ferait injure de la comparer 4 une autre; de facon que Smiley gardait Daniel dans une petite boite 4 clairc-voie qu’il emporta it parfois 4 la ville pour quelque pari. “Un jour, un individu ctranger au camp Varréte avec sa boite et lui dit:—Qu’est-ce que vous. avez donc serré¢ 1i dedans ? 38 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. “Smiley dit d’un air indifférent :—Cela puorrait étre un perroquet ou un serin, mais ce u’est rien de pareil, ce n’est qu’une grenouille. “Lindividu la prend, la regarde avec soin, la tourne d’un coté et de l’autre puss il dit.—Tiens ! en effet! A quoi est-elle bonne ? “—Mon Dieu! répond Smiley, toujours d'un air dégagé, elle est bonne pour une chose 4 mon avis, elle peut battre en sautant toute grenouille du comté de Calaveras. “L’individu reprend la boite, l'examine de uouveau longuement, et la rend a Smiley en disant d'un air délibéré:—Eh bien! je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu’aucune grenouille. “Possible que vous ne le voyiez pas, dit Smiley, possible que vous vous entendiez en gre- ouilles, possible que vous ne vous y entendez point, possible que vous ayez de l'expérience, et pos- sible que vous ne soyez qu’un amateur. De toute manieére, je parie quarante dollars qu'elle battra en sautant n’importe quelle grenouille du comté de Calaveras. “individu réfléchit une seconde et dit comme attristé:—Je ne suis qu’un étranger ici, je n’ai pas de srenouille ; mais, si j’en avais une, je tiendrais le pari. “Fort bien! répond Smiley. Rien de plus facile. Si vous voulez tenir ma boite une minute, j'irai vous chercher une grenouille.—Voila donc V’individu qui garde la boite, qui met ses quarante dollars sur ceux de Smiley et qui attend. Il attend assez longtemps, réfléchissant tout seul, ‘et figurez-vous qu'il prend Daniel, lui ouvre la bouche de force et avec une cuiller a thé l'emplit de menu plomb de chasse, mais l’emplit jusqu'au menton, puis il le pose par terre. Smiley pendant ce temps était 4 barboter dans une mare. Finalement il attrape une grenouille, l'apporte a cet individu et dit:—Maintenant, si vous étes prét, mettez-la tout contre Daniel, avec leurs pattes de devant sur la méme ligne, et je donnerai le signal ;—puis il ajoute :—Un, deux, trois, sautez! : Lui et Pindividu touchent leurs grenouilles par derriére, et la grenouille neuve se met a sautiller, mais Daniel se souléve lourdement, hausse les épaules ainsi, comme un Frangais ; 4 quoi bon? il ne pouvait bouger, il était planté solide comme une enclume, il n’avangait pas puls que si on I’etit mis al'ancre. Smiley fut surpris et dégotité, mais il ne se doutait pas du tour, bienentendu. L’individu empoche I'argent, s’en va, et en s’en allant est-ce qu’il ne donne pas un coup de pouce pat-dessus 1é’paule, comme ¢a, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air délibéré:—Eh bien! je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu’une autre. “Smiley se gratta longtemps la téte, les yeux fixés sur Daniel, jusqu’a ce qu’enfin il dit:—Je me demande comment diable il se fait que cette béte ait refusé... Est-ce qu’elle aurait quelque chose ?.. On croirait qu’elle est enflée. “J1 empoigne Daniel par la peau du cou, le souléve et dit:—Le loup me croque, s'il ne pése pas cinq livres. \ “Tl le retourne, et le malheureux crache deux poignées de plomb. Quand Smiley reconnut ce THE FUMPING FROG, 39 qui en était, il fut comme fou. Vous le voyez d'ici poser sa grenouille par terre et courir aprés cet individu, mais il ne le rattrapa jamais, et... [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 worthless: 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 '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; and if there is meeting at the camp (meeting au camp) he comes to bet regu- larly for the curé Walker, which he judged to be the best predicator of the neigh- borhood (prédicateur 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 himself caring to go so far; neither of the time which he there lost. One time the woman of the curé Walker is very sick during long time, it seemed that one not her saved not; but one morning the curé 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 4 l’infinie miséricorde) so much better that 40 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. with the benediction of the Providence she herself of it would pull out (elle s’en tirerait); and behold that 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 exclamation?—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 échauffer, of herself exasperate, and she arrives herself écartant, se défendant, her legs gréles 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 éternumens 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 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, André Jackson—this was the name of the dog—André 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 sieze the other dog just at the articulation of the leg of behind, and he not it leave more, not that he it masticate, 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-l4; 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 deccived in him, and that the other dog him had. You no have never see person having the air more penaud and more discouraged; he not made no effort to gain the combat, and was rudely shucked. THE JUMPING FROG. 41 Eh bien! this Smiley nourished some terriers 4 rats, and some cocks of combat, and some cats, and all sort 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 & sauter) in a court retired of her mansion (desa maison). And I you respond that he have succeeded. 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 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 a 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 bytimes to the village 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.” 42 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 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! Ino 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 com- prehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;. possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but an amateur. Of all manner, (De toute maniére) I bet 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: “T 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’ irai 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 aswamp. 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, exalted the shoulders thus, THE FUMPING FROG. 43 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 saying 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 1’épaule, comme ca, au pauvre Daniel, endisant de son air délibéré) : “Eh bien! J 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: “T 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 mal- hereus, etc).—When Smiley recognized how it was, he was likemad. 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 this Frenchman to try to make it appear that I said, “Eh bien! Ino saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog?” Ihave no heart to write more. I never felt so about anything before. HARTFORD, March, 1875. 1) X\\\" : iL} e =, TENNESSEE. ft AAS : The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops x thus mildly down upon a correspondent who posted \\ \ \ \\ him as a Radical :—‘tWhile he was writing the first \Y \ N word, the middle, dotting his i's, crossing his t’s, and punching his period, he knew he was concoct- x LEC SS ‘| ing a sentence that was saturated with infamy and AKSeS reeking with falsehood.”—Zxchange. <= . WAS told by the physician that a I [eS Southern climate would improve my Zi 7 ACR S= health, and so I went down to Tennes- ie 4 : see, and got a berth on the Morning Glory Y f and Johnson County War-Whoop as asso- x ZY, ciate editor. When I went on duty I IM Spelt wir LRG EEE 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 44 FOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE. 45 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 hang- ing 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 worea ruffled shirt, a large seal ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a check- ered 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 concocting a particularly knotty editorial. He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the “ Spirit of the Tennessee Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest. I wrote as follows :— “ SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE 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 Zarthguake will, of course, take pleasure in making the correction. “John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Free- don, arrived in the city yesterday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House. “We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs Aforning 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 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.” 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!” £6 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 sym- metry 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. However, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out. “ 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, ere 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 evidently 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 /fozwl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journal- ism 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 per- sistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity. “ Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement—it wants a jail and a poorhouse more, The idea of a pavement in a one horse town composed of two gin mills, a blacksmith’s shop, and that mustard- FOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE. 47 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 ¢hat is the way to write—peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk jour- nalism 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.” “T 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 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 gentleman 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. 48 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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’ bewil- dered by the fusilade that was still ringing in my ears to think of anything to say. 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 cow-. hides are under the table; weapons in the drawer—ammunition there in the corner —lint and bandages up there in the pigeon-holes. Incase 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 corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs, 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 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 glim- mering 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 FOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE. 49 expression has its inconveniences, and a man is liable to interruption. 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 entertaining 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. 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 4 50 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 Tennes- sean 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. Tennesseean journalism is too stirring for me.” After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the hospital. : aE Sg ii, EB a 7) ACCENT WARD. SS AE ; Z ‘} i Woe Wor | | iy ‘ STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY. 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 harsh and cold towards him when she was gone. Most bad boys in the Sunday-books are named James, and have sick mothers, 51 52 MARK TWAIN’S SKETCHES, who teach them to say, “Now, I lay me down,” etc., and sing them to sleep with sweet, plaintive 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 consumption, nor anything of that kind. She was rather stout than otherwise, and she was not pious ; moreover, 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 Once this little key of the pantry, there and helped jam, and filled up so that his mother the difference; but ble feeling didn’t and something whisper to him, obey my mother? this? Where do who gobble up mother’s jam?”’ kneel down all never to be wicked leave him. bad boy stole the and slipped in himself to some the vessel with tar, would never know all at once a terri- come over him, didn’t seem to “Ts it right to dis- Isn't it sinful to do bad little boys go their good kind and then he didn’t alone and promise 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 hereyes. No; that isthe 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 any- thing about it, and she whipped him severely, and he did the crying himself. STORY OF A BAD LITTLE BOY. 53 Everything about this boy was curious—everything turned out differently with him from the way it does to the bad Jameses 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 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 les- sons, 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 com- mitted!” 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 frres, and run errands, and chop wood, and study law, and help his wife do household labors, and have all the balance of 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 54 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. moral boys. Jim said he was “down on them milksops.” Such was the coarse language of this bad, neglected boy. But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim was the time he went boat- ing 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 light- ning. 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. Ohno; you would find that all the bad boys who go boating on Sunday invariably get the bad boys who storms when they drowned; and all get caught out in are fishing on Sun- struck by light- bad boys in them day infallibly get ning. Boats with always upset on Sunday, and it al- bad boys go fish- bath. How this isa mystery to me. charmed life—that the way of it. ways storms when ee Ze Z ing on the Sab- LE Jim ever escaped This Jim bore a must have been Nothing could gave the elephant Li g NY AA . ; “NS hurthim. Heeven in the menagerie a plug of tobacco, and the elephant didn’t knock the top of his head of with his trunk. He browsed around the cupboard after essence of peppermint, and didn’t make a mistake and drink agua 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 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. Meran off and went to sea at last, and didn’t come back and find himself sad and alone in the world, his loved ones sleeping in the quiet churchyard, and the vine-embow- STORY OF A BAD LITTLE BOY. 55 ered 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 thein all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality ; and now he is the infernalest 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. Se oe ce THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY. O-.. there was a good little boy by the name of Jacob Blivens. He always obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and unreasonable their demands 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 convenient 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 56 STORY OF A GOOD LITTLE BOY. 57 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] said before, they could only figure out a sort of vague idea that he was “afflicted,” and 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 relations 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 handkerchief’s that had as much asa 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, and telling her to spend it freely, but not to be extravagant, because extravagance is asin; 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. That was the ambition of young Jacob Blivens. He wished to be put in a Sunday-school book, It made him feel a little uncomfortable some- times when he reflected that the good little boys always died. He loved to live, 58 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about being a Sunday-school- book boy. He knew it was not healthy to be good. He knew it was more fatal than consumption to be so supernaturally good as the boys in the books were; he knew that none of them had ever 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 make up his mind could under the live right, and he could, and have all ready when his But somehow right with this nothing ever him the way it the good little They always had the bad boys had but in his case loose somewhere, pened just the SSOSSs VG Cy SSO “Gy. 4 HAL alr SANG lil hw ho Ly, He if’ Wii G#foF# TAT WZ) Wyte Ck ie WH Wg Bh WES, Matta ee “iy , mesaghacietcumess MG, My 64 Nee We He Uy, HEM ty HHANESG HH teeagg He AAA by Whey t LYE SS ~ SS aS SN S Ss SS a SSS SSN Ty SS SS LER SS course, he had to to do the best he circumstances—to hang on as long as his dying speech time came, nothing ever went good little boy; turned out with turned out with boys in the books, a good time, and the broken legs; ‘there was a screw and it all hap- 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 42m, and broke Azs arm, and Jim wasn’t hurt at all. Jacob couldn’t understand that. There wasn’t anything in the books like it. And once, when some bad boys pushed a blind man over in the mud, and 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 STORY OF A GOOD LITTLE BOY. 59 he would like to catch him shoving 47m again, and then pretending to help him up. This was not in accordance 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 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 dumbfounded. When he got well he was a little discouraged, but he resolved to keep on trying anyhow. He knew that so far his experiences wouldn’t do to goina 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 asa 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 60 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. the captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and he said, “Oh, that be blowed! that wasn’t any proof that he knew how to wash dishes or handle a slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn’t want him.” This was altogether the most extraordinary thing that ever happened 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 never had in any book that ever #e had read. He could hardly believe his senses. This boy always had a hard time of it. Nothing ever came out according to theauthorities one day, when he ing up bad little he found a lot of iron foundry fix- joke on fourteen which they had long procession, to ornament with erine cans made Jacob’s heart was down on one of never minded was before him), of the foremost and turned his upon wicked Tom with him, At last, was around hunt- boys to admonish, them in the old ing up a little or fifteen dogs, tied together in and were going empty nitro-glyc- fast to their tails. touched. He sat those cans (for he grease when duty and he took hold dog by the collar, reproving eye 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 STORY OF A GOOD LITTLE BOY. 61 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. 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 newspaper 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; 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—xow 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! 62 Au il lh NIAGARA. la pees FALLS is a most enjoy- able place of resort. The hotels are excellent, and the prices not pial at all exorbitant. The opportunities for BN UNL A i/ fishing are not surpassed in the country; aa i nee in fact, they are not even equalled else- | where. 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. 63 pal AL Mi Tate art TL Le We Fs ‘ 64 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 privilege of looking down from a preci- pice into the narrowest 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, AZaid 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 smokestack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break and part asunder—and how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplish- ing the incredible feat of travelling seventeen miles in six minutes, 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 smashing down on to you. Either possibility is discomforting 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 photogra- phers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontis- piece 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 Aave 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 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, and all looming up in their awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed NIAGARA. 65 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 gath- ered themselves to their blood relations, the other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust. There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display one’s marvellous insignificance 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 beautiful. A guide, similarly dressed, led the way down a flight of winding stairs, which wound and wound, = still kept on winding long after the thing ceased to be a 66 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. novelty, and then terminated long before it had begun to be a pleasure. We were then well down under the precipice, but still consid- erably above the level of the river. We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our persons shielded from destruction by a crazy wooden railing, to which I clung with both hands—not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to. Presently the descent became steeper, 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 pro- gress was mostly in the nature of groping. Now a furious wind began to rush out from behind the waterfall, which seemed determined 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 froth 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 fol- lowed. All was darkness. Such a mad storm- ing, 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. ihe world seemed going to destruction. I could not see anything, the NIAGARA, 67 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 slippery and precipitous rocks. J 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. | 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 character, 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 representing 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, diligently 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 effeminate civilization dilute the picturesque pomp which is so natural to the Indian when far removed from us in his native haunts. I addressed the relic as follows :— | “Ts 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 dreaming 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 68 MARK TWAIN’S SKETCHES. a bY SSS SS SN N = y] pappooses of the paleface? Speak, sublime relic of bygone grandeur—venerable ruin, speak !”” The relic said— “An’ is it 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 NIAGARA, 69 boring a hole through his abdomen to put his bow through. I hesitated a moment, and then addressed her: “Ts 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 vanished glory of her ancestors? Or does her sad spirit 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!”’ 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 fra- ternize with them, 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 prop- erty of others, has gotten you into trouble. Misrepresenting facts, in your simple 70° MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. innocence, has damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper. Trading for forty-rod whisky, 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 nineteenth century, gotten up like the ragtag and bobtail of the purlieus of New York. Forshame! Remember your ancestors! Recall their mighty deeds! Remember Uncas!—and Red Jacket!—and Hole in the Day!—and Whoopdedoodledo! Emulate their achievements! Unfurl your- selves under my banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes ” “Scoop the blaggard!” “Burn him!” “Hang him!” ” “Down wid him “Dhround him!” It was the quickest operation that ever was. I simply saw a sudden flash in the air of clubs, brickbats, 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 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— NIAGARA. 71 “Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a drowning man, but will you explain this singular conduct 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 anything happened to me, to 7 sence as to throw my custom into the Yy so time the occur- lt hands of the oppo- I a 4 sition coroner over f ee side. ie Bs At last a police- man came along, Ds on the American ROTH Vy Hy WW and arrested me for disturbing the peace by yelling at help. The judge the advantage of people on shore for fined me, but I had him. My money was with my pant- aloons, and my with the Indians. Iam now lying in dition. At least I —critical or not pantaloons were Thus I escaped. avery critical con- am lying anyway critical. Iam hurt ; all over, but I can- not tell the full W 2 YAM” ae I? \ extent yet, because the doctor is not done taking 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— “Tt is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the bead work and moccasins for Niagara Falls, doctor. Where are they from?” “ Limerick, my son.” e Ma 3S 6 IG Sa “Angwers ta Correspondents. “Morat STatTISTICIAN.”—I don’t want any of your statis- tics; 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 im- paired, 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 occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous.fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question. You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutch- men both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid 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 appall- ing aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from zof smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do 72 ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS. 713 with it? What use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, 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 yourself 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, seeing 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 eyes buried in the cushion, when the con- tribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full state- ment 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? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worth- less 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 “ornery ” and unloveable 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 particle 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. “Younc 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 average, 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 74 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. accompanying poem have just come to hand from the rich gold-mining region of Sonora :— To Mr. Mark Twain: The within parson, which I have set to poetry under the name and style of “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 handyest man about takin’ holt of anything 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 naterally, 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 humbly 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. 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. 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. * 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 beiter. ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS, 75 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 waz 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 Mowsgray,”* Dutch Flat.—This correspondent sends a lot of dog- gerel, and says it has been regarded as very good in Dutch Flat. I give a specimen 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. “Sr. CLair Hiccins.” Los Angeles.—'‘My life is a failure; I have adored, wildly, madly, and *This piece of pleasantry, published in a San Francisco paper, was mistaken by the country journals for seriousness, and many and loud were the denunciations of the ignorance of author and editor, in not knowing that the lines in question were “ written by Byron.” 76 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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. “ ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.— If it would take a cannon 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 discov- ered by Alexander Selkirk. t “DISCARDED LoverR.”—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 unwritten, is on you side. The intention and not the act constitutes crime—in other words, constitutes the ded. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and ¢#fend it for an insult, it zs an insult; but if you do it playfully, and meaning no insult, it is zof 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 ¢ztend to kill him, but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the z#/ention constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder. Ergo, if you had married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intend- ing to do it, you would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage could not be complete without the zz/ention. And ergo, in the strict spirit of the law, since you deliberately fended to marry Edwitha, and didn’t do it, you ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS. 77 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 mutilating Jones with it as much as you can. Any man hasa right to protect his own wife from the advances of other men. But you have another alternative—you were married to Edwitha jirs/, 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 zntended to marry Edwitha, and consequently, according to law, she is your wife—there is no getting around that; but she didn’t marry you, and if 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 Ausband when she married Jones, and consequently she was not guilty of bigamy. Now, according to this view of the case, Jones married 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 zuéention of getting married, and therefore, of course, never had been married; and by the same reasoning you are a dachelor, because you have never been any one’s Ausband; and a married man, because you have a wife living; and to all intents and purposes a wddower, 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—TI might get confused and fail to make myself understood. 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 reckles..y heaving immense solid bouquets, of the general size and 78 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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, 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 sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don’t try to knock her down with it. “Younc Motuer.”—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 this 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 compe- tent 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 cannot 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 appetite that have ever fallen under my notice. I will set down here a statement of this infant’s operations (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 forehead, 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 ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS. 79 more than a dozen tablespoonfuls of strong spirits of camphor. 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 ortwo. 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 will remark here that this thing of beauty likes painted German lucifers, and eats all she can get of them; but she prefers California matches, which I regard as a com- pliment 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 for ever happened to have nothing particular on hand, she put in the time by climbing up on places, and ‘falling down off them, uniformly damaging herself in the opera- tion. 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 cannot 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 further 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 she may be elevated (merely stipulating that her preference 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 satisfaction.) But I find I have wandered from my subject; so, without further argument, I will reiterate my conviction that not @// babies are things of beauty- and joys forever. 80 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES, * ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.— 1 am an enthusiastic student of mathematics, and it is $0 vexatious to me to find my progress, constantly impeded by these. mysterious arithmetical tech- nicalities. Now do tell me what the difference is between geometry and conchology?” Here you come again with your arithmetical conundrums, 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 from the centre 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 mathematics: 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 tnintellectual clam as you. Now compare conchology and geometry tovether, and you will see what the difference is, and your question will be answered. jut don't torture 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, Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the sub- ject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready sympa- thy 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 chick- ens, 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 * Being a letter written to a aes Society that had conferred a eonip lence: membership upon the author. 6 ~ 81 82 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES, really suppose I had raised more poultry than any one individuafpi/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 fowls that I cannot but think that a few hints from me might be useful to the Society. 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, because in some States—especially in California and Oregon—chickens al- ways rouse up just at midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according 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 neighbor’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 RAISING POULTRY. 83 bag with you or leaving it behind, according as circumstances shall dictate. WV. B.; I have seen the time when it was eligible and appropriate to leave the sack behind _ and walk off with considerable velocity, without ever leaving any word where to, — send it. In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you carry a long'slender. plank. This isa frosty night, understand. Arrived 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 Black- stone, whether he is not really and ‘deliberately committing suicide in the second degree. [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 interested in, the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that he secures somebody else’s immediate attention to it too, 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 a dollar and a half a-piece, and yet are so unwholesome that the city physician seldom or never orders them for the workhouse. 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 pro- miscuously, 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 84 MARK TWAIN’S SKETCHES. 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. 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 himself. I thank these gentlemen for the honorary membership 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 eleven o’clock, and I shall be on hand promptly. Es fl i Z i Hut ae EXPERIENCE OF THE McWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP, [As related to the author of this book by Mr. Mc Williams, a pleasant New York gentleman whom the said author met by chance on a journey.) ELL, to go back to where I was before \ \ I digressed to explain to you how that frightful and incurable disease, mem- branous croup, was ravaging the town and driving all mothers mad with terror, I called Mrs. McWilliams’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 85 86 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 nutritious 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 perceptibly, and said: “ Hubby, you know better than that. “You know you do. Doctors a// 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 inthe child’s chewing a bit of pine stick if she wants to, and you know it perfectly well. And she shad// 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—” “© 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 zever 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 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.” “Ts there any hope for him?” THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP. 87 “None in the wide world. O, what is to become of'us!” By and bya nurse brought in our Penelope to say good-night and offer the customary prayer at the mother’s knee. sleep,” she gave a slight cough! My wife fell back like one stricken with death, In the midst of “ Now I lay me down to 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 nurse. But now liams said we away from the what if Ze were to toms in the blanched again, We then re- and the nurse and put vp a in a room ad- Presently, McWilliams baby should nelope? This a new panic to the tribe of us crib out of the fast enough to room for the Mrs. McWil- were too tar other baby, and have the symp- night—and she poor thing. stored the crib to the nursery bed for ourselves joining. however, Mrs. said suppose the catch it from Pe- thought struck her heart, and could not get the nursery again satisfy my wife, though she assisted in her 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 we 88 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 a/ways sleeps like a graven image.” “T know.. I know; but there’s something peculiar about his sleep, now. Hé 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 inexperienced. 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 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 foreordaitied. 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. THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP. 89 “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! Don’t you know that every moment is precious now? But what was the use in sending medicines, when he 4nows that the disease is incurable? ” i 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 teaspoonful 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 pounany 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! Morti- mer, 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.” “ Ithought 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: “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 go MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 ona cat, which responded with a protest and would have got a convincing 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, Caroline.” “Well look at the chair, too—I have no doubt it is ruined. Poor cat, suppose you had—” creme “Now I am not going to thing about the would have oc- had been al- here and attend suppose any- cat. It never curred if Maria lowed to remain My Gi an) As wl “| to these duties, which are in her CAD }, line and are not « “Now Morti- think you would in mine.” mer, I should SS be ashamed to like that. It is cannot do the make a remark 6) i iY Hy a pity if you few little things eS Task of you at such an aw- this when our “There, there, thing you want. ful time as child—” I will do any- - But I can’t raise this bell. They’re Where is the “On the mantel piece in the nursery. If you'll step there and speak to Maria—” anybody with all gone to bed. goose-grease ?” 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. Would you mind lighting the fire? It is all ready to touch a match to.” ‘ THE MEMBRANOUS CROUP. gt I dragged myself out and lit the fire, and then sat down disconsolate. “ 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. Mc Williams sprang out of bed and trae (AIZEN) Vem, | we nee rescued it an GiS\/g4) |e y we had some another trifling words. I had WC interval of sleep, and then got up, by request, and constructed tice. This was child’s breast do its healing a flax-seed poul- placed upon the and left there to work. A wood fire is * not a perma- nent thing. I got up every twenty minutes andrenewed ours, and this gave Mrs. Mc Williams the op- portunity to shorten the times of giving the medicines by ten minutes, which was a great sat- Now and _ then, I reorganized the isfaction to her. between times, 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 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 92 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. her extra clothing. Now mightn’t we put on another layer of poultices and—” I did not finish, because I was interrupted. I lugged 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: “Tt is allover! Allover! The child’s perspiring! What ska// we do? : Mercy, how you terrify me! J don’t know what we ought to do. Maybe if we scraped her and put her in the draft again—” “©, 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 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 something of the kind, and got some fittle 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 very 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 passing interest to the reader.] MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE, 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 sensation in the community. It did, indeed, and I was very 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 Hanni- bal Journal, two dollars a year in advance—five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, and unmarketable turnips), 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! 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 was full of it for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine opportunity. I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and then illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden type with a jack-knife—one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity aboutisuch 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 matter to charge’ the editor. of a. neighboring. country 93° - 94 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. paper with a piece of gratuitous rascal- ity 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 crude parody it was, too. Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously—not because they had done anything to deserve 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 cox- comb 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—— 1,” 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 asa 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 MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE. 95 sustain, and from this time forth when he wants to commune with his’ friends: in h—l, 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-barrelled shot-gun early in the forenoon. When he found that 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, suffering 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 bump- er of “Fahnestock’s Vermituge.” It was his little joke. My uncle was very angry when he got back—unreasonably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had given the paper, and considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to. have been uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so wonderfully . escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head shot off. But he softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had actually booked the unparalleled 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! , T is seldom pleasant to tell -on one’s self, but sometimes = it is a sort of relief to a “ey "LGPL man to make a confession. I wish to unburden my mind now, and yet I almost believe that Iam moved to do it more because I long to bring cen- sure 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 gentlemen 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 96 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK. 97 1? once more! Oh,if I could only see him weep! never withstand distress. I said: “ Bring him to my lecture. I'll start him for you.” “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 I was touched. I could 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, 1 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 asmile or atear! 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 my head with cold water, and said: “ What made yuu 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, because 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? i a ; MESS Z EG: ; IS ty Mi if Fy alte ir Ns GE a ae Ly, Po / 5 4 THE OFFICE BORE, | | E arrives just as regularly as the clock strikes nine in the morning. And so he even beats the editor sometimes, and the SS porter must leave his work and climb two or three pair of stairs to unlock the “ Sanctum ” door and let Ze LE, him in. He lights one of the office Lege pipes—not reflecting, perhaps, that the editor may be one of those SSW “stuck-up” people who would as soon have a stranger defile his tooth- St LLL L ITS LLL AA és brush as his pipe-stem. Then he begins to loll—for a person who can ccnsent to loaf his useless life away in ignominious indolence has not the energy to sit 98 THE OFFICE BORE. 99 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 observable that with all his changes of position, he never assumes the upright or a fraudful affectation of dignity. From time to time he yawns, and stretches, and scratches himself with a tranquil, mangy enjoyment, and now and then he grunts a kind of stuffy, overfed grunt, which is full of animal con- tentment. 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 fora 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 sprawl] round the office hour after hour, swapping anecdotes, and relating personal experiences to each other— hairbreadth escapes, social encounters with distinguished men, election reminis- cences, 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 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 b Cole) MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. enters the door; to suffer through his anecdotes and die slowly to his reminis- cences; to feel always the fetters of his clogging presence; to long hopelessly for ‘one single day’s privacy; to note with a shudder, by and by, that to contemplate 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 afflic- tion that transcends any other that men suffer. Physical pain is pastime to it, and hanging a pleasure excursion. JOHNNY GREER. “ HE church was densely crowded that lovely summer Sabbath,” said T 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 ? se Wiese: “Towed the carkiss ashore and saved it yo’self?’ “« Ves.’ “¢Cracky! What did they give you?” “* Nothing.’ “¢W-h-a-t! [with intense disgust.] D’you know what Id a done? I’d a anchored him out in the stream, and said, Five dollars, gents, or you carn't have yo’ nigger. 329) CONTRACT. In 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 distorted statements and extravagant comments. The origin of this distressful thing was this—and I assert here that every fact in the following résumé can be amply proved by the official records of the General Government :— John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung county, New Jersey, de- ceased, contracted with the General Government, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861, to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of thirtv barrels of beef. Very well. He started after Sherman with the beef, but when he got to Washington Sherman had gone to Manassas; so he took the beef and followed him there, IoI 102 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. but arrived too late; he’ followed him to Nashville, and from Nashville to Chattanooga, and from Chattanooga to Atlanta—but he never could overtake him. At Atlanta march to the sea. again by a few that Sherman was Quaker City excur- Land, he took ship- calculating to head When he arrived his beef, he learned not sailed in the had gone to the Indians. He re- and started for the After sixty-eight travel on the he had got within man's head-quar- ahawked and Indians got the beef. They got all of it but one barrel. he took a fresh start and followed him clear through his He arrived too late days; but hearing going out in the sion to the Holy ping for Beirut, off the other vessel. in Jerusalem with that Sherman had Quaker City, but Plains to fight the turned to America, Rocky Mountains. days of arduous Plains, and when four miles of Sher-~ ters, he was tom- scalped, and the 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 MACKENSIE, of New Jersey, deceased.... Dr. To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100...... Deaoumsaad Salakeawre $3,000 To traveling expenses and transportation. ..cseceseseeccerereeeeereteesteces 14,000 He died then; but he left the contract to Wm. J. Martin, who tried to collect , THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT. 103 it, but died before he got through. He left it to Barker J. Allen, and he tried 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 unsummoned, 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 Auditor. In his will he gave the contract bill to his uncle, by the name of O-be-joyful Johnson. It was too undermining for Joyful. His last words were: ‘“‘Weep not for me—/Z am willing to go.” And so he was, ae poor soul. Seven 7 hay g people inherited that; but they all into my hands at the contract after REWRLERARE died. So it came last. It fell to me é through a relative by the name of 4 Hubbard—B et h- lehem Hubbard, of i abi Indiana. He had had a grudge EZ i against me for a long time; but in Te Ay 2 his last moments he sent for me, and Mae | @ forgave me every- thing, and, weep- Mliima | ing gave me the beef contract. | This ends the history of it up to z : the time that I suc- ceeded tothe prop- |= erty. I will now endeavor to set z myself straight before the nation : sss in everything that concerns my share in the matter. I took this beef contract, and the bill for mileage and transportation, to the Pres- ident of the United States, He said, “ Well, sir, what can I do for you?” I said, “Sire, on or about the 1oth day of October, 1861, John Wilson Mac- kenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung county, New Jersey, deceased, contracted with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of thirty barrels of beef ——” 104 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 roth day of October, 1861, John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung county, New Jersey, deceased, contracted 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 nothing to do with contracts for beef.” 7 “T was bowed out. I thought the matter all over, and finally, the following day, I visited the Secretary of the Navy, who said, “ Speak quickly, sir; do not keep me waiting.”’ I said, “ Your Royal Highness, on or about the roth day of October, 1861, John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung county, New Jersey, deceased, contracted 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 Government. It looks somewhat 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 nothing 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 Depart- ment; I waylaid the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Zhey had nothing to do with army contracts for beef. I moved upon the Commissioner of the. Patent Office. I said, “ Your August Excellency, on or about THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT. 105 “Perdition! have you got here with your incendiary beef contract, at last ? We have zothing to do with beef contracts for the army, my dear sir.” “Oh, that is all very well—but somedody has got to pay for that beef. It has got to be paid zow, too, or I'l] confiscate this old Patent Office and everything 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 ina 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 goto. 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 roth day of October, 1861, John Wilson Macken——” “That is sufficient, sir. I have heard of you. Go to the First Auditor of the Treasury.” Idid so. He sent meto 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 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 showing 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 tne newspapers looked at me rather hard, but went on reading, and 106 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 I 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] said to one of the clerks who was reading— “Tllustrious 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 before 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 / 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 rejoiced—for I had survived. I said with emotion, “Give it me. The Govern- ment 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.”’ ““Who tomahawked him?” THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT. 107 “ Why, ar 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? J don’t know his name.” “ Must have his name. Who saw the tomahawking done?” “TI 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 2xow 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 tomahawk ?” “T never thought of such a thing.” “You must get the tomahawk. You must produce the Indian and the toma- hawk. 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 will never pay that transportation and those traveling 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 appropriation 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 ¢/a? isn’t certain! After all Mackenzie’s travels in Europe, Asia, and America with that beef; after all his trials and tribulations and transportation; after the slaughter of all those innocents that tried to collect that bill! Young man, why didn’t the First Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division tell me this.” 108 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. ‘ “He didn’t know anything about the genuineness of your claim.” ‘Why didn’t the Second tell me? why didn’t the Third? why didn’t all those divisions and departments 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 with 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 —here is the beef contract; go, take her and be happy! Heaven bless you, my children!” This is ail 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 connected with it. I only know that if a man lives long enough he can trace a thing through the Circumlocution 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 Circumlocution Office were as ingeniously systematized as it would be if it were a great private mercantile institution. + THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER.* HIS is history. It is not a wild extravaganza, like “John Williamson Mackenzie’s Great Beef Contract,” but is a plain state- ment of facts and circumstances 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 unre- lenting swindle upon the Government and people of the United States—for * 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 109 IIo MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. it has never 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. 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 Zzd/ans destroyed the property, there was no relief for Fisher; but if the ¢roops destroyed it, the Government of the United States was debtor to Fisher for the amount involved. George Fisher must have considered that the Zudians 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 cornfields, 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 belonging to a peaceable private citizen, and also destroyed various other property 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 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 robbing of our government was a novelty. The very man who showed me where to find the docu- ments 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. THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER, 1IX 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 pur- suit,” and of course the Government 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 spirits of the Fisher family, the Auditor concluded to go back and allow iaterest 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 Government with their 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 indigent Fishers. So now we have :—First, $8,873 damages; 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 investment 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 hearing. Thr y persuaded Congress to pass an act requiring 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 ad been paid too much already. 112 MARK TWAIN’S SKETCHES. 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 Secretary of War—John B. Floyd, of peculiar renown! Here was a master intel- lect; 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 cornfields 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, “1T WAS PROVED that the Indians destroyed everything they could before the troops entered in pursuit.” Ue 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 Govern- ment 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 intelligent 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 property destroyed by the troops—which property consisted of (I quote from the printed ~ United States Senate document)— DOLLARS. Corn at Bassett’s Creek ‘i = . ‘ i . . 3,000 Cattle . % : ‘ < Se Suk, $i . . 5,000 Stock hogs. 5 . : . . . A . 1.050 Drove hogs . 5 : < . . . . s 1,204 Wheat . a . . si . 5 . . 350 Hides . 5 : é - : . ° 7 . 4,000 Corn on the Alabama River . ‘ . . . . . 3,500 Total. ‘ ‘ ‘ . s : 18,104 ' That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the “ fud/ value of the property destroyed by the troops.” He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, TOGETHER WITH THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER. 113 INTEREST FROM 1813. From this new sum total the amounts already paid to the Fishers were deducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction under forty thousand dollars) was handed to them, and again they retired to Florida in a condi- tion 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 Hi MILE ELE We “Lif Whe: leet ; ‘ : Ye li % Be LRG 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) discovered what was appar- ently a glaring and recent forgery in the papers, whereby a witness’s testimony as 8 114 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 par- ticular attention to it in writing. That part of the brief ever got before Congress, nor has Congress ever yet had a hint of a forgery existing among the Fisher papers. Nevertheless, 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 the fall of 1813 corn was only worth from $1.25 to $1.50 a bushel. Having accomplished 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, and in this new bill he placidly zgnores the ndians 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 drinking 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 ¢vedle the loss of corn on the “ Alabama River.” This new and ably con- ceived 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, Dot. C. 1813.—To 550 head of cattle, at ro dollars : ® ‘ 5,500 00 To 86 head of drove hogs . . . . . * 1,204 00 To 350 head of stock hogs . . . . . 1,750 00 To 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT’S CREEK . . . 6,000 00 To 8 barrels of whisky - . . . ° ° 350 00 THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER, 115 To 2 barrels of brandy és é ‘ x e 280 00 To 1 barrel of rum . . . ; F : 5 7000 | To dry goods and merchandise in store 4 . . : I,100 00 To 35 acres of wheat , 5 ij : : : 350 00 To 2,000 hides , OO as : : : 4,000 00 To furs and hats in store . : : 7 : . 600 00 To crockery ware instore . . . . . . TOO 00 To smiths and carpenters tools, . : . : 250 00 To houses burned and destroyed. 5 - . 3 600 00 To 4 dozen bottlesof wine . : : : . i 48 00 1814.—To 120 acres of corn on Alabama River . : 3 . 9,500 00 To crops of peas, fodder, etc. 3 . 8 . . 3,250 00 Total is F 7 . : c ‘ 34,952 00 To interest on $22,202, from July 1813 to November 1860, 47 years and 4 months . é ‘ 2 : 5 63,053 68 To interest on $12,750, from September 1814 to November 1860, 46 yearsand2 months . ‘ é ‘ e . 35,317 50 Total % : F : ‘ 133,323 18 He puts everything in this time. He does not even allow that the Indians destroyed the crockery or drank 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 announced that the Government was still indebted to them inthe sum of sexty-six thousand five hundred and nineteen dollars and eighty-five cents, “ which,’ Mr. Floyd complacently remarks, “will be paid, accordingly, 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 financial business for a while, and go into the Confederate army and serve their country. 116 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. Were the heirs of George Fisher killed? No. They are back now at this very time (July 1870), beseeching Congress through that blushing and diffident creature, "Garrett Davis, to commence making payments again on their interminable and insatiable bill of damages for corn and whisky destroyed by a gang of irresponsible Indians, so long ago that even government 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 Department of the Capitol for H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 21, 36th Congress, znd Session, and for S. Ex. Doc. No. 106, 41st. Congress 2nd Ses- sion, 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 Government 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 Congress. 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 generation to generation of fathers and sons, through the perse- cuted Treasury of the United States, DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY. 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 Chinamen.” What a commentary is this upon human justice! What sad prominence it gives to our human disposition to tyrannize over the weak! San Francisco 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 Chinamen? 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 villainy 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 commonwealth of Califor- nia 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 respectable number of the tax- gatherers—it would be unkind to say all of them—collect the tax twice, instead of once; and that, inasmuch as they do it solely to discourage Chinese immigra- tion into the mines, it is a thing that is much applauded, and likewise regarded ° as being singularly facetious. 117 118 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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, Hon- durans, 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 studying 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 would seem that the reporters were gone mad with admiration of the energy, the virtue, the high effectiveness, 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 China- man who was stealing chickens, and brought him gloriously to the city prison; and how “the gallant 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 policeman, during a waking interval, and captured him at last in the very act of placing his hands in a suspicious manner upon a paper of tacks, left by the owner in an exposed situation; and how one officer performed 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 for the poor and the 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 DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY. 11g every Chinman, upon landing, must be vaccinated upon the wharf, and pay to the State’s appointed officer /en 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, nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffering when it was convenient to inflict it; everybody, individuals, communities, the majesty of the State itself, joined in hating, abusing, and persecuting these humble strangers. And, therefore, what cou/d 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 high and holy thing to stone a Chinaman, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty that he is punished 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 Brannan Street set their dogs on un- offending 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 “I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at presént 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 occasion 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 pub- lish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the paper. 120 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 the police are glad, too. Because there is no personal peril in arresting boys, provided they be of the smal] kind, and the reporters will have to laud their performances just as loyally as ever, or go without items. The new form for local items in San Francisco will now be:—“The ever vigilant and efficient officer So-and-so succeeded, yesterday afternoon, in arrest- ing 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 extraor- cinary activity prevails in the police department. Nothing like it has been seen since we can remember.” ti AZ Y Vit Ys % NG, Sd THE JUDGE'S “SPIRITED WOMAN.” “W WAS sitting here,” said the judge, “in this old pulpit, holding court, and we I were trying a big, wicked-looking Spanish desperado for killing the husband 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 husband with all her tnight, and now she had boiled it all down into hate, and stood here 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 smoking 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 always brought in “ not guilty,” the jury expecting him to do as much for them some time; and, although the evidence was straight and square 121 122 ¢ MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. ¢ against this Spaniard, we knew we could not convict him without seeming to be rather high-handed and sort of reflecting 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— “*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, 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. J 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!” INFORMATION WANTED. “WASHINGTON, December 10, 1867. EO ies you give me any infor- A mation respecting such islands, if any, as the Government is going to purchase?” It is an uncle of mine that wants to know. He is an industrious man and well-disposed, and wants to make a living in an honest, humble way, but more especially he wants to be quiet. He wishes to settle down, and be quiet and unostentatious. He has been to the new island St. Thomas, but he says he thinks things are unsettled there. He went there early with an attaché of the State department, who was sent down with money to pay for the island. My uncle had his money in the same 123 124 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. box, and so when they went ashore, getting a receipt, the sailors broke open the box and took all the money, not making any distinctfon between Government money, which was legitimate money to be stolen, and my uncle’s, which was his own private property, and should have been respected. But he came home and got some more and went back. And then he took the fever. There are seven kinds of fever down there, you know; and, as his blood was out of order by reason of loss of sleep and general wear and tear of mind, he failed to cure the first fever, and then somehow he got the other six. He is not a kind of man that enjoys fevers, though he is well-meaning and always does what he thinks is right, and so he was a good deal annoyed when it appeared he was going to die. But he worried through, and got well and started a farm. He fenced it in, and the next day that great storm came on and washed the most of it over to Gibralter, or around there somewhere. He only said, in his patient way, that it was gone, and he wouldn’t bother about trying to find out where it went to, though it was his opinion it went to Gibralter. Then he invested in a mountain, and started a farm up there, so as to be out of the way when the sea came ashore again. It was a good mountain, and a good farm, but it wasn’t any use; an earthquake came the next night and shook it all down. It was all fragments, you know, and so mixed up with another man’s property, that he could not tell which were his fragments without going to law; and he would not do that, because his main object in going to St. Thomas was to be quiet. All that he wanted was to settle down and be quiet. He thought it all over, and finally he concluded to try the low ground again, especially as he wanted to start a brickyard this time. He bought a flat, and put outa hundred thousand bricks to dry preparatory to baking them. But luck appeared to be against him. A volcano shoved itself through there that night, and elevated his brickyard about two thousand feet in the air. It irritated him a good deal. He has been up there, and he says the bricks are all baked right enough, but he can’t get them down. At first, he thought maybe the Government would get the bricks down for him, because since Government bought the island, it ought to protect the property where a man has invested in good faith; but all he wants is quiet, and so he is not going to apply for the subsidy he was thinking about. INFORMATION WANTED, 125 Iie went back there last week in a couple of ships of war, to prospect around the coast for a safe place for a farm where he could be quiet; but a great “ tidal wave” came, and hoisted both of the ships out into one of the interior counties, and he came near losing his life. So he has given up prospecting in a ship, and is discouraged. ; Well, now, he don’t know what todo. He has tried Alaska; but the bears kept after him so much, and kept him so much on the jump, as it were, that he had to leave the country. He could not be quiet there with those bears prancing after him all the time. That is how hecame to go to the new island we have bought— St. Thomas. But he is getting to think St. Thomas is not quiet enough for a man of his turn of mind, and that is why he wishes me to find out if Government is likely to buy some more islands shortly. He has heard that Government is think- ing about buying Porto Rico. If that is true, he wishes to try Porto Rico, if it isa quiet place. How is Porto Rico for his style of man? Do you think the Govern- ment will buy it? E LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOUB OLD BSYS AND SIRLS. i ii IN THREE PARTS. Part First. HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD SENT OUT A SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION, NCE the creatures of the forest held a great O convention and appointed a commission consisting of the most illustrious scientists among them to go forth, clear beyond the forest and out into the unknown and unexplored world, to verify the truth of the matters already taught in Ng ts 5 Zz their schools and colleges and also to make discoveries. It was the most imposing enterprise of the kind the nation had ever embarked in. True, the government 126 FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS. 129 had once sent Dr. Bull Frog, with a picked crew, to hunt for a north-westerly passage through the swamp to the right-hand corner of the wood, and had since sent out many expeditions to‘hunt for Dr. Bull Frog; but they never could find him, and so government finally gave him up and ennobled his mother to show its gratitude for the services her son had rendered to science. And once govern- ment sent Sir Grass Hopper to hunt for the sources of the rill that emptied into the swamp; and afterwards sent out many expeditions to hunt for Sir Grass, and at last they were successful—they found his body, but if he had discovered the sources meantime, he did not let on. So government acted handsomely by deceased, and many envied his funeral. But these expeditions were trifles compared with the present one; for this one comprised among its servants the very greatest among the learned; and besides it was to go to the utterly unvisited regions believed to lie beyond the mighty forest —as we have remarked before. How the members were banqueted, and glorified, and talked about! Everywhere that one of them slowed himself, straightway there was a crowd to gape and stare at him. Finally they set off, and it was a sight to see the long procession of dry-land Tortoises heavily laden with savans, scientific instruments, Glow-Worms and Fire- Flies for signal-service, provisions, Ants and Tumble-Bugs to fetch and carry and delve, Spiders to carry the surveying chain and do other engineering duty, and so forth and so on; and after the Tortoises came another long train of iron-clads— stately and spacious Mud Turtles for marine transportation service; and from every Tortoise and every Turtle flaunted a flaming gladiolus or other splendid banner; at the head of the column a great band of Bumble-Bees, Mosquitoes, Katy-Dids. and Crickets discoursed martial music; and the entire train was under the escort and protection of twelve picked regiments of the Army Worm. : At the end of three weeks the expedition emerged from the forest and looked upon the great Unknown World. Their eyes were greeted with an impressive spectacle. = SS SSS SSS Even as ch a 6S 2 = 9 8B o € + Oo | at 2 ow Sg 8, E oS a 2 mn 8 a 8 Oo n 2% a & So ee ° 3 XR 6 Soo oS 8 oa

io a wf n os @ a 9 Sa = cr =| aS OS SH HES a fea tee ? a Bee S ClgggagtaEs Sea ey Yow GUS aaa SS << Sat a f =< in such to see ing ill tead of regret and grave reflection? hen we find ourselves w ty losity ins 231 10n W lous cur . 1V0O ? Is it not time for reflect tter for fr ing, mai 1S th a be 232 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. Here was a poor creature whom hard fortune had exiled from his natural 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, 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— “Cheer up—don’t be down-hearted. It is not America that treats you in this way, it is merely one citizen, whose greed of gain has eaten the humanity out of hisheart. America has a broader hospitality 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. a SS ee H f H i | CROONS oe WE . SSS HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER. DID not take temporary editorship of an agricultural paper without misgivings. Neither would a landsman take command of a ship without misgivings. 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 233 234 MARK TWAIN'S SRETCHES. office, toward sundown, a group of men and boys at the foot of the stairs dispersed with one impulse, and gave me passage-way, and I heard one or two of them say: “That’s him!” Iwas naturally pleased by this incident. 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 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 tomy 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 af 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 before?” “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 gentleman, putting on his spectacles, and looking over 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:— ‘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 HOW 1 EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER. 235: township alone by being pulled in a half-ripe condition, 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. 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, motionless, with finger on lip, and head and body bent in listeriing attitude. Nosound was heard. Stillhelistened. Nosound. 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— “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 merciful moonlight over a desolate landscape: “The guano is a fine bird, but great care is necessary in rearing 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 c= the pumpkin.—This berry is a feyavite with the natives of the interior of New England, who prefer it to the gooseberry for the making of fruit-cake, and who likewise give it the preference over the raspberry for feeding cows, as being more filling 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 planting 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” 236 MARK TWAIN’S SKETCHES. 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 morning, I said to myself, I never, never believed it before, not- withstanding 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 crippled several people, and have got one fellow up a tree, where 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 zs 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 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.” ‘HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER. 237 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 myself, 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 dejected. 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 are crazy. And well they might after reading your editorials. They 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 season 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 article 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—lI 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. Nothingon earth could persuade me 238 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES, to take another holiday. Oh! why didn’t you ¢e// me you didn’t know anything about agriculture?” “ Tell you, you cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It’s the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell youI 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 torun 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 temperance 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 general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow- colored novel line, sensation-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 higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows if I had but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent 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. ButI have done my duty. I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to doit. I said I could make your paper of interest to all classes—and I have. I.said I could run yourcirculation 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 trom a peach-vine to save his life. You are the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant. Adios.” I then left. ! i a The PEIUFTER WAN, 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 experiences of my own in this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about ex- traordinary 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 ridiculous. I was a bran-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have 239 240 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 alto- gether 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, 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 detail, all about petrified man at (exactly a hundred over a breakneck from where savants of the im- hood had been to notorious that living creature of there, except a dians, some crip- and four or five meat and too fee- how those savants petrified man to belief - compelling the finding of a Gravelly Ford and twenty miles, mountain trail, lived) ; how all the mediate neighbor- examine it (it was there was not a within fitty miles few starving In- pled grasshoppers, buzzards out of ble to get away); all pronounced the have beenin astate of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; = 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 rever- ence for official duty, on that awful five days’ journey, through alkali, sage-brush, peril of body, and imminent starvation, to Aold an inquest on this man that had been dead and turned to ee 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 pied a verdict that deceased came to his death from protracted exposure. This only moved me to higher flights of imagination, THE PETRIFIED MAN. 241 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 sitting, 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 proceeded to drill a hole under him, in order to Alast him from his posttion, 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 was a string of roaring absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretence of truth that even imposed 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 siéting to explain to the public that he -was aswindle. 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 something 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 asd comprehended the peculiar and suggestive position 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 derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in thelist . of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced. I was so disappointed at the curious miscarriage 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 16 242 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. Petrified Man copied and guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satis- faction; 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 culminated 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 all 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 without killing him. Tah ange ‘ Hf HLH} vit | lier other burlesque I have referred to was my fine satire upon the financial expedients of “cooking dividends,” a thing which became shamefully fre- quent 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 cf the Daney Silver-Mining Company, whose directors had decldred 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 : 243 Vs Ko y 3 244 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. stocks and invest in sound and safe San Francisco stocks, such as the Spring Valley Water Company, etc. But right at this unfortunate juncture, behold the Spring Valley cooked a dividend too! And so, under the insidious mask of an invented “bloody massacre,” I 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 the 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 lucrative 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 carefully and conscientiously interesting that the public devoured ¢tem greedily, and wholly overlooked the following distinctly-stated facts, to wit:—The murderer was perfectly well known to every creature in the land as a dachelor, 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, 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 consequently there could be no forest Jetween 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 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 ¢/a?, and dropped dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy and admiration of all beholders. Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little satire MY BLOODY MASSACRE. 245 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 something 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 cloth. — ing which was the sign and evidence ae — that they were in from the Truckee | - ’ AN with a load of hay. had the morning The one facing me paper folded to a long narrow strip, and I knew, with- out any telling, that that strip rep- resented the col- umn that con- tained my pleasant financial satire. From the way he was excitedly that the heedless was skipping with mumbling, I saw son of a hay-mow all his might, in bloody details as ble; and so he was boards I had set that the whole thing was a fraud. Presently his eyes spread wide open, just as his jaws swung asunder to take in a potato approaching it on a fork; the potato halted, the face lit up redly, and the whole man was on fire with excitement. Then he broke into 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 performance of my hero. At last he looked his stunned and rigid comrade impressively in the face, and said, with an expression of concentrated awe— order to get to the quickly as possi- missing the guide- up to warn him | 246 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. “ Jim, he b’iled his baby, and he took the old ’oman’s skelp. Cuss’d if 7 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 in 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 forgotton since, that we never read the dull explanatory surroundings of marvellously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is try- ing to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and be happy. THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT. = OW, that corpse,” said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of N deceased approvingly, “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. J 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, fe 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 des- tination onto it with a blacking brush and a stencil plate, ‘long with a verse from some likely hymn or other, and p’int him for the tomb, and mark him C. O.D., and just let him flicker. Me 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 247 248 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 ke 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 Arizona 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 Azm behind. He was the 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 measure 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 singing line; but the first time he opened: his mouth and was just going to spread himself his breath took a walk. “T 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 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 JT didn’t respect his THE UNDERTAKER’S CHAT. 249 last wishes and tow him behind the hearse 71] be cuss’d. I consider that what- ever a corpse wants done for his comfort is little enough matter, and a man hain’t got no right to deceive him or take advantage of him; and whatever a corpse trusts me to do I’m a-going to de, 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 amy 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. GS x N\ S SM auilld i os eee LNW eal Ali NY . SZ see SEAT) fl if i i ’ CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS., GAINST all chambermaids, of whatsoever age or nationality, I launch the A 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 morn- ing, they receive not the suggestion in a friendly spirit; but, glorying in their 250 CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS. 251 absolute sovereignty, and unpitying your helplessness, 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 transposed 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. 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 attitude 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 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 ee 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 ‘ 252 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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? Absolutely 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 something. In which case I suppose the degraded creatures divide. 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 nothing else. Chambermaids are dead to every human instinct. If I can get a bill through the Legislature abolishing chambermaids, I mean to do it. ey i | rE ae : : ae i ! 4 i iY Ly LZ Ss 7 Ws g AURELIA’S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN. ce facts in the following case came to me by letter from a young lady who lives in the beautiful ‘city of San José; she is perfectly unknown to me, and simply 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: 253 ‘ 254 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 Williamson 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 it seemed as if their career was destined to be characterized 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 marriage-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 engagement, 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 pass- ing from her by piecemeal, feeling, as she did, that he could not last for ever under this disastrous process of reduction, yet knowing of no way to stop its dreadftl career, and in her tearful despair she almost regretted, like brokers who hold on and lose, that she had not taken him at first, 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 disappointment overshadowed it: Caruthers fell ill with the erysipelas, and lost the use of one his eyes entirely. The friends and relatives of the bride, considering 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 Breckinridge was to blame._ AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN. 255 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 Jersey. He was hurrying home with happiness in his heart, when he lost his hair for ever, and in that hour of bitterness he almost cursed the mistaken mercy that had spared his head. At last Aurelia isin serious perplexity as to what she oughttodo. Shestill loves her Breckinridge, she writes, with truly womanly feeling—she still loves what is left of him—but her parents are bitterly opposed 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 lifelong happiness of a woman, and that of nearly two-thirds of a man, and I feel that it would be assuming too great a responsiblity to do more than make a mere suggestion 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, without 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 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 honestly 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 256 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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. “AFTER” JENKINS. GRAND affair of a ball—the Pioneers’—came off at the Occidental some A time ago. The following notes of the costumes worn by the belles 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 pd/é de foie gras, made expressly for her, and was greatly admired. 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 taste- fully dressed in a ‘out ensemble, and was greeted with deafening applause wherever she went. Mrs. C. N. was superbly arrayed in white kid gloves. Her modest and engaging manner accorded well with the unpretending simplicity of her costume and caused her to be regarded with absorbing interest by every one. The charming Miss M. M. B. appeared ina thrilling waterfall, whose exceeding grace and volume compelled the homage of pioneers and emigrants alike. How beautiful she was! The queenly Mrs. L. R. was attractively attired in her new and beautiful false teeth, and the Jon 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 sparkling 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. Aa \4 Sato? s | ABOUT BARBERS. A LL things change except bar- bers, the ways of barbers, and the surroundings of barbers. These never change. What one ex- periences in a barber’s shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in barbers’ shops after- wards 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 happens. 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 17 257 258 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 remaining two barbers, for he had already begun combing 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 interest. When I saw that No. 2 was gaining on No. 1 my interest grew to solicitude. When No. x stopped a moment to make change on a bath ticket for a new 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, unsocia- ble, distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who are awaiting their turn in a barber’s shop. I sat down in one of the iron-armed compartments 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 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 happensso. I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected ABOUT BARBERS. 259 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 disparaging 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 re- garding himself in the glass, stop- ping now and then to get close and examine his 2 aa Va chin critically or inspect a pimple. Then he lathered one thoroughly, and lather the other, side of my face was about to when a dog fight attracted his at- tention, and he ran to the win- dow and stayed and saw it out, losing two shill- ings on the result in bets with the thing which gave tion. He finished then began to with his hand. 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 other barbers, a me great satisfac- lathering,and rub in the suds He now began the chaffings of his fellows. This matter begot more surveyings of himself in the ‘glass, and he put down his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care, plaster- ing an inverted arch of it down on his forehead, accomplishing an accurate “ part ” 260 MARK TIWAIN'S SKETCHES. behind, and brushing the two wings forward overt 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 came. He now made a handle of my nose, to assist him in shaving the corners of my was by this bit of dence that I dis- of his duties in the the kerosene upper lip, and it Ss : as ‘s cy wy circumstantial evi- iM Mes ny my a aN ae oe covered that a part SSosy Sy shop was to clean wondered in an whether the bar- whether it was the About this time self trying to guess lamps. Ihadoften ‘/ === = indolent way bers did that, or boss. RAAF Cait: HTH I was amusing my- where he would be most likely to cut me this time, but he got ahead of me, and sliced me on the end of the chin before I had up. He immedi- got my mind made ately sharpened his razor—-he might fore. I do not like a close shave, and would not let him 3B o overmea have done it be- 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 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 his 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 ABOUT BARBERS. 261 that way. Then he dried it by slapping with the dry part of the towel, as if a human being ever dried 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 chcked 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 yesterday. 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 perfume, “ Jones’ Delight of the Toilet,” and proposed to sell me some of that. I declined again. He tendered me a tooth- wash atrocity of his own invention, and when I declined offered to trade knives with me. 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, tubbed 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 cyebrows 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 min- utes 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. UU A week ago a About one half of the Each party does all ELFAST is a peculiarly relig- ious community. This may be said of the whole of the north people are Protestants and the other it can to make its own doctrines pop- ular and draw the affections of the constantly of the most touching in- “PARTY CRIES” IN IRELAND, half: Catholics. stances of this zeal. of Ireland. -irreligious toward them. One hears i] Mh vast concourse of Catholics assembled at Armagh to dedicate a new Cathedral ; 262 and when they started home again the roadways were lined with groups of “PARTY CRIES” IN IRELAND. 263 meek and lowly Protestants who stoned them till all the region round about was marked with blood. I thought that only Catholics argued in that way, but it seems to be a mistake. Every man in the community is a missionary and carries a brick to admon- ish the erring with, The law has tried to break this up, but not with perfect success. It has decreed that irritating “party cries” shall not be indulged in, and that persons uttering them shall be fined forty shillings and costs. And so, in the police court reports, every day, one sees these fines recorded. Last week a girl twelve years old was fined the usual forty shillings and costs for pro- claiming in the public streets that she was “a Protestant.” The usual cry is, “To hell with the Pope!” or “To hell with the Protestants!” according to the utterer’s system of salvation. One of Belfast’s local jokes was very good. It referred to the uniform and inevitable fine of forty shillings and costs for uttering a party cry—and it is no economical fine for a poor man, either, by the way. They say that a policeman found a drunken man lying on the ground, up a dark alley, entertaining him- self with shouting, “To Ae// with!” “To #e/ with!” The officer smelt a fine —informers get half: “What's that you say?” “To hell with!” “To hell with who? To hell with what?” . “ Ah, bedad ye can finish it yourself—it’s too expinsive for me!” I think the seditious disposition, restrained by the economical instinct is finely put, in that. THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION. WASHINGTON, Dec. 2, 1867. I HAVE resigned. The Government appears to go on much the same, but there is a spoke out of its wheel, nevertheless. I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology, and I have thrown up the position. I could see the plainest disposition on the part of the other members of the Government to debar me from having any voice in the counsels of the nation, and soI could no longer hold office and retain my self-respect. If I were to detail all the outrages that were heaped upon me during the six days that I was connected with the Govern- ment in an official capacity, the narrative would fill a volume. They appointed me clerk of that Committee on Conchology, and then allowed me no amanuensis to play billiards with. I would have borne that, lonesome as it was, if I had met with that courtesy from the other members of the Cabinet which was my due. But I did not. Whenever I observed that the head of a department was pursuing a wrong course, I laid down everything and went and tried to set him right, as it was my duty to do; and J never was thanked for it in a single instance. I went, with the best intentions in the world, to the Secretary of the Navy, and said— “Sir, I cannot see that Admiral Farragut is doing anything but skirmishing around’ there in Europe, having a sort of pic-nic. Now, that may be all very well, but it does not exhibit itself to me in that light. If there is no fighting for him to do, let him come home. There is no use ina man having a whole fleet for a pleasure excursion. It is too expensive. Mind, I do not object to pleasure excursions for the naval officers—pleasure excursions that are in reason—pleasure excursions that are economical. Now, they might go down the Mississippi on a raft ” You ought to have heard him storm! One would have supposed I had commit- ted a crime of some kind. But I didn’t mind. I said it was cheap, and full of 264 FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION, 265 republican simplicity, and perfectly safe. I said that, for a tranquil pleasure excursion, there was nothing equal to a raft. Then the Secretary of the Navy asked me who I was; and when I told him I was connected with the Government, he wanted to know in what capacity, I said that, without remarking upon the singularity of such a question, coming, as it did, from a member of that same Government, I would inform him that I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology. Then there was a fine storm! He finished by ordering me to leave the premises, and give my attention strictly to my own business in future. My first impulse was to get him removed. However, that would harm others beside himself, and do me no real good, and so I let him stay. I went next to the Secretary of War, who was not inclined to see me at all until he learned that I was connected with the Government. If I had not been on important business, I suppose I could not have got in. I asked him for a light (he was smoking at the time), and then I told him I had no fault to find with his defending the parole stipulations of General Lee and his comrades in arms, but that I could not approve of his method of fighting the Indians on the Plains. I said he fought too scattering. He ought to get the Indians more together—get them together in some convenient place, where he could have provisions enough for both parties, and then have a general massacre. I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him sometime or other. It undermines his constitution; it strikes at the foundation of his being. “Sir,” I said, “the time has come when blood-curdling cruelty has become necessary. Inflict soap and a ” spelling-book on every Indian that ravages the Plains, and let them die!” The Secretary.of War asked me if I was a member of the Cabinet, and I said I was. He inquired what position I held, and I said I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology. I was then ordered under arrest for contempt of court, and restrained of my liberty for the best part of the day. I almost resolved to be silent thenceforward, and let the Government get along 266 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. the best way it could. But duty called, and I obeyed. I called on the Secretary of the Treasury. He said— “What will you have?” The question threw me off my guard. I said, “ Rum punch.” He said, “If you have got any business here, sir, state it—and in as few words as possible.” I then said that I was sorry he had seen fit to change the subject so abruptly, because such conduct was very offensive to me; but under the circumstances I would overlook the matter and come to the point. I now. went into an earnest expostulation with him upon the extravagant length of his report. I said it was expensive, unnecessary, and awkwardly constructed; there were no descriptive passages in it, no poetry, no sentiment—no heroes, no plot, no pictures—not even woodcuts, Nobody would read it, that was a clear case. I urged him not to ruin his reputation by getting out a thing like that. If he ever hoped to succeed in literature, he must throw more variety into his writings. He must beware of dry detail. I said that the main popularity of the almanac was derived from its poetry and conundrums, and that a few conundrums distributed around through his Treasury report would help the sale of it more than all the internal revenue he could put into it. I said these things in the kindest spirit, and yet the Secretary of the Treasury fell into a violent passion. He even said I was anass. He abused me in the most vindictive manner, and said that if I came there again meddling with his business, he would throw me out of the window. I said I would take my hat and go, if I could not be treated with the respect due to my office, and I did go. It was just like a new author. They always think they know more than anybody else when they are getting out their first book. Nobody can tell them anything. During the whole time that I was connected with the Government it seemed as if I could not do anything in an official capacity without getting myself into trouble. And yet I did nothing, attempted nothing, but what I conceived to be for the good of my country. The sting of my wrongs may have driven me to unjust and harmful conclusions, but it surely seemed to me that the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others of my confréres, had conspired FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION. 267. from the very beginning to drive me from the Administration. I never attended but one Cabinet meeting while I was connected with the Government. That was sufficient for me. The servant at the White House door did not seem disposed to make way for me until I asked if the other members of the Cabinet had arrived. He said they had, and I entered. They were all there; but nobody offered me a seat. They stared at me as if I had been an intruder. The President said— “Well, sir, who are you?” I handed him my card, and he read—' The Hon, Mark Twain, Clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology.” Then he looked at me from head to foot, as if he had never heard of me before. The Secretary of the Treasury said— oe This is the meddlesome ass that came to recommend me to put poetry and conundrums in my report, as if it were an almanac.” The Secretary of War said—“ It is the same visionary that came to me yesterday with a scheme to educate a portion of the Indians to death, and massacre the balance.” The Secretary of the Navy said—“I recognize this youth as the person who has béén interfering with my business time and again during the week. He is distressed about Admiral Farragut’s using a whole fleet for a pleasure excursion, as he terms it. His proposition about some insane pleasure excursion on a raft is too absurd ‘to repeat.” I said—“ Gentlemen, I perceive here a disposition to throw discredit upon every act of my official career; I perceive, also, a disposition to debar me from all voice in the counsels of the nation. No notice whatever was sent to me to-day. It was only by the merest chance that I learned that there was going to be a Cabinet meeting. But let these things pass. All I wish to know is, is this a Cabinet meeting, or is it not?” The President said it was. “Then,” I said, “let us proceed to business at once, and not fritter away valuable time in unbecoming fault-findings with each other’s official conduct.” The Secretary of State now spoke up, in his benignant way, and said, “ Young man, you are laboring under a mistake. The clerks of the Congressional commit- tees are not members of the Cabinet. Neither are the doorkeepers of the Capitol, 268 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. strange as it may seem. Therefore, much as we could desire your more than human wisdom in our deliberations, we cannot lawfully avail ourselves of it. The counsels of the nation must proceed without you; if disaster follows, as follow full well it may, be it balm to your sorrowing spirit, that by deed and voice you did what in you lay to avert it. You have my blessing. Farewell.” These gentle words soothed my troubled breast, and I went away. But the servants of a nation can know no peace. I had hardly reached my den in the capitol, and disposed my feet on the table like a representative, when one of the Senators on the Conchological Committee came in in a passion and said— “Where have you been all day?” I observed that, if that was anybody’s affair but my own, I had been to a Cabinet meeting. “To a Cabinet meeting? I would like to know what business you had at a Cabinet meeting?” I said I went there to consult—allowing for the sake of argument, that he was in anywise concerned in the matter. He grew insolent then, and ended by saying he had wanted me for three days past to copy a report on bomb-shells, egg-shells, clam-shells, and I don’t know what all, connected with conchology, and nobody had been able to find me. This was too much. This was the feather that broke the clerical camel’s back. I said, “ Sir, do you suppose that [ am going to wor for six dollars a day? If that is the idea, let me recommend the Senate Committee on Conchology to hire some- body else. JI am the slave of wo faction! Take back your degrading commission. Give me liberty, or give me death!” From that hour I was no longer connected with the Government. Snubbed by the department, snubbed by the Cabinet, snubbed at last by the chairman of a committee I was endeavoring to adorn, I yielded to persecution, cast far from me the perils and seductions of my great office, and forsook my bleeding country in the hour of her peril. But I had done the State some service, and I sent in my bill:— The United States of America in account with the Hon. sa ei the Senate Committee on Conchology, Dr. To consultation with Secretary of War, : 3 : $50 To consultation with Secretary of Navy, . : . F A : : . 50 FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION. , 269 To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury, ‘ ‘ , 2 ‘ 50 Cabinet consultation, : . No charge. To mileage to and from Jerusalem, * vid Egypt, Algiers, Gibraltar, and ibs: 14,000 miles, at 20c. a mile, . ' , 2800 To salary as Clerk of Senate Committee on Conchology, s six days, at $6 per day, . 36 Total, : . . - 5 . z : . $2986 Not an item of this bill has been paid, except that trifle of 36 dollars for clerkship salary. The Secretary of the Treasury, pursuing me to the last, drew his pen through all the other items, and simply marked in the margin “ Not allowed.” So, the dread alternative is embraced at last. Repudiation has begun! The nation is lost. Iam done with official life for the present. Let those clerks who are willing to be imposed on remain. I know numbers of them, in the Departments, who are never informed when there is to he a Cabinet meeting, whose advice is never asked about war, or finance, or commerce,.by the heads of the nation, any more than if they were not-connected with the Government, and who actually stay in their offices day after day and work! They know their importance to the nation, and they unconsciously show it in their bearing, and the way they order their suste- nance at the restaurant—but they work. I know one who has to paste all sorts of little scraps from the newspaper into a scrap-book—sometimes as many as eight or ten scraps a day. He doesn’t do it well, but he does it as well ashe can. It is very fatiguing. It is exhausting to the intellect. Yet he only gets 1800 dollars a year. With a brain like his, that young man could amass thousands and thousands of dollars in some other pursuit, if he chose to do it. But no—his heart is with his country, and he will serve her as long as she has got a scrap-book left. And I know clerks that don’t know how to write very well, but such knowledge as they possess they nobly lay at the feet of their country, and toil on and suffer for 2500 dollarsa year. What they write has to be written over again by other clerks, some- times; but when a man has done his best for his country, should his country complain ? Then there are clerks that have no clerkships, and are waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for a vacancy—waiting patiently for a chance to help their country out— * Territorial delegates charge mileage both ways, although they never go back when they get here once. Why my mileage is denied me is more than I can understand. 270 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. and while they are waiting, they only get barely, 2000 dollars a yearforit. Itis sad— itis very, very sad. When a member of Congress has a friend who is gifted, but has no employment wherein his great powers may be brought to bear, he confers him upon his country, and gives him a clerkship in a Department. And there that man has to slave his life out, fighting documents for the benefit of a nation that never thinks of him, never sympathizes with him—and all for 2000 or 3000 dollars a year. When I shall have completed my list of all the clerks in the several departments, with my statement of what they have to do, and what they get for it, you will see that there are not half enough clerks, and that what there are do not get half enough pay. Lg + VEL pr Zn HE following I find in a fi pores Island paper which some friend has sent me from that tranquil far-off retreat. The coincidence between my own ex- perience and that here set down by the late Mr. Benton is so re- markable that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the paragraph. The Sandwich Island paper says :— i “ How touching is this tribute of the late Hon. T. H. Benton to his mother’s in- fluence :—‘ My mother asked me never to use tobacco; I have never touched it from i that time to the present day. She asked if Mey me not to gamble, and I have never gam- HH bled. I cannot tell who is losing in games ip that are being played. She admonished me, too, against liquor-drinking, and what- ever capacity for endurence I have at present, and whatever usefulness I may have attained through life, I attribute to having complied with her pious and cor- rect 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 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 black- snake 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. 271 272 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES, 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 abstinence. That I have adhered to it and enjoyed the benefi- cent 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. OM Mi | = = ee = fl q HONQURED AS A GURIDSITY, F you get into conversation with I a stranger in Honolulu, and ex- perience 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 narrow- ly, and if you see by his counte- nance that you are on the wrong track, ask him where he preaches, It isasafe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler. I became personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six missionaries. The captains and ministers form one-half of the population ; 18 273 274 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES... the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families; and the final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian Government. 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 !” 7 ““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 thousands 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 member 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 were too much for him, and he 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.” . THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. [Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as well.”—B. HIS party was one of those ar persons whom they call Phi- losophers. 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 disposi- tion, and early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms 276 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages. His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up for 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 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 smouldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also, or else have Benjamin Franklinthrown up to them. Not proceedings, he living wholly on and studying time—a thing affliction to mil- whose fathers had pernicious biogra- His maxims mosity towards a boy cannot fol- natural instinct over some of those risms and hearing satisfied with these had a fashion of bread and water, astronomy at meal ‘which has brought lions of boys since, read Franklin’s phy. were full of ani- boys. Nowadays low out a single without tumbling everlasting apho- 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 any thing 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— THE LATE BENFAMIN FRANKLIN. 277 ‘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’ experi- menting on me with it, tongue cannot tell. The legitimate result is my present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration. My parents used to have me up before nine o'clock in the morning, sometimes, when I wasa 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 public would go home chirping about the “wisdom” and the “genius” of the hoary Sabbath- breaker. If anybody caught him playing “ mumble-peg ” by himself, 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, happened 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 observed, with his customary force, that the bayonet was very well under some circum- stances, but that he doubted whether it could be used with accuracy at a long range. 278 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored 1n 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 mili- tary inspirations, his unseemly endeavor to make himself conspicuous when he entered Philadel- his kite and fool- = phia, and his flying “ALY iio Ct gi CLE ing away his time 7 Eg LE in all sorts of such MA 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 calamituus idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great genius by working for noth- ing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night instead of waiting till morn. tian; and that this ly inflicted, will ing like a Chris- programme, rizid- make a Franklin of every father’s fool. It istime AMM I 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 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 every- thing just as Franklin did, in the solemn hope that I would be a Franklin some day. And here I am. Ty whan we ave Surrounded. way of deciphering atrocious penmanship. that .s done with a pen. BOUT the A most curious feature of the London post-office . isthe “Blind-Letter” Department. Only one clerk is em- ployed in it and sometimes his place is a sinecure for a day at a time, and then again it is just =| the reverse. His specialty is a won- derful knack in the 279 THE “BLIND LETTER” DEPARTMENT, LONDON P. O. That man can read anything 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-similes of 280 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. the most astonishing specimens he comes across, Te also keeps fac-similes of many of the envelopes that pass through the office with queer pictures drawn 7 | . Sy wy Swot fs i Sos STE upon them. He was kind enough to have some of the picture-envelopes and [TO THE MAJESTY THE QUEEN, AND THE PRINCESS OF WALES.] execrable superscriptions copied for me, (the latter with “translations ” added,) and I here offer them for the inspection of the curious reader. 281 “BLIND LETTER” DEPARTMENT, LONDON P. O. [Rev’p E. W. EDGELL, 4o ¥ ORK S'., GLOUCESTER PLACE, Lonvon.] y FROM DR, LIVINGSTONE 10 HIS DAUGH MINISTERS, INTELLIGENGE OFFICE FOR WATE WY < AJ jy SENT BY ONE CLERGYMAN TO ANOTHER. 282 “BLIND LETTER” DEPARTMENT, LONDON P, O. =< 2S SN SSS SOS SS SETAD TEs SSS nes = eg LLL, WHEE OE Ger, FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD. HAD never seen him before. He brought letters of introduction from mutual friends in San Francisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with him. It was almost religion, there in the silver mines, to precede 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 283 284 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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, 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 matter, 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 formation 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 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 understand any more than a clam.” And then I said aloud— “]—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, ard perhaps I don’t present my case clearly, but I” FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD, 285 “No, no—no, no—you state it plain enough, but that cocktail has muddled me alittle. 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 checking 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, suppose you go down on that, say a thousand feet, or maybe twelve hundred (it don’t really matter), before 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 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 palpably demonstrated 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 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 286 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 compromising the relative differences existing within the radius whence culminate , the several degrees of similarity 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 anything. 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 victim of a swindle in the way of a string of plausibly worded sentences that didn’t mean any- thing 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 conver- sation, but, with the above experience in my mind, I differ. i) VISITED St Louis lately, and on my I 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 sub- jects 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 287 288 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and Representatives in the Chambers of the National Legislature. 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. Then his face settled into thoughtfulness—almost into gloom. Heturned 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 animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always with feeling and earnestness. THE STRANGER’S NARRATIVE. “On the r9th 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 soon formed. The journey bade fair to be a happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had even the vaguest presentiment of the horrors we were soon to undergo. “At ir 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, unobstructed 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 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 CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS. 289 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 uselessness 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 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 provisions 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 discussion 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 blast; the Jamps 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 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 habitation; nothing but a vast 19 290 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 linger- ing 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 imprison- ment! A savage hunger 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 yield. Ricuarp H. Gaston, of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous, 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, Joun J. WiLiiaMs, of Illinois, rose and said: ‘Gentlemen,—I nominate the Rev. James Sawyer, of Tennessee.’ “Mr.Wm. R. Apams, of Indiana, said: ‘I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote, of New York.” “Mr. Cartes J. Lancpon: ‘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 gentleman’s desire will be acceded to.” . “Mr. VAN Nostranp objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected. The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and refused upon the “game grounds. oak 2 ” -: CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS. 2g! “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 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 understandingly.’ “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. 1' am satisfied with the nominations that have been made—every gentleman 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 gentleman from New Jersey——’ “Mr. Van Nostranp: ‘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. Morcan, of Alabama (interrupting): ‘I move 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 Baldwin, a committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the committee in making 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 Herrman, of Louisiana, and W. Messick, of Colorado, as candidates. The report was accepted. “Mr. Rocers, 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 char- acter and standing of the gentleman from Louisiana—far from it. I respect and esteem him as much as any gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us 292 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 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 com- mittee has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or a graver fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however pure his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him: “Tue Cuair: ‘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?’ “Mr, Ha.uipay, of Virginia: ‘I move to further amend the report by substi- tuting Mr. Harvey Davis, of Oregon, for Mr. Messick. It may be urged by gentlemen 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 dispute about matters of paltry significance? No, gentlemen, 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. Morcan (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. Iask 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 Oregonian 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 unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from Oregon’s inhospitable shores? Never!’ (Applause.) “The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery debate, and lost. Mr. 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 himself. It was then moved that his election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in consequence of his again voting against himself. CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS, 293 “Mr. Rapway 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 members 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 considerable dissatisfaction among the friends of Mr. Ferguson, 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 gratitude to, the finest supper that had blessed our vision for seven torturing days. How changed we were from what we had been a few short hours before! Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger, feverish anxiety, desperation, 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 breakfast 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 tha “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 after- wards. 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 Ala-. bama, for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever'sat down to,—handsome 294 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. educated, refined, spoke several languages fluently—a perfect gentleman—he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy. For supper we had that Oregon patri- arch, 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 7 will wait, for another election. And Grimes, of Illinois, said, ‘Gentlemen, 7 will wait also. When you elect a man that has something to recommend him, I shall be glad to join you again.’ It soon became evident that there was general dissatisfac- tion 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 McEl- roy, because he was uncommonly 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 Buck- minster—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 ad@ come at last ?” “Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election. John Murphy was the choice, and there 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- v “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 con- venient 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! CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS, 295 ‘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 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 monomaniac, 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 oppo- sition, 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 harm- less vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal, be Devigurdl Fxnomniat. ne Deviplural fanoeummtsl. = HERE was a fellow traveling T 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 per- formance the showman 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 some- times last night the piece you hap- pened 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, 296 THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST. 297° as it were—was a little foreign to the subject, you know—as if you didn’t either trump or follow suit, you understand ? ’ : - “s 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 pario- rama 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 thing would corral their'sympathies, the showman said. - 3 eS “ There was a big audience that night—mostly middle-aged and old peoplé 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 ta 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— : « Se. 6-8 «“‘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 from 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 welcoming. 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— “