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Title: Sketches New and Old

Author: Mark Twain

Release date: June 27, 2004 [eBook #3189]
Most recently updated: January 27, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3189

Credits: Produced by David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES
NEW AND OLD ***

SKETCHES NEW AND OLD

by Mark Twain

Complete

CONTENTS:
MY WATCH

POLITICAL ECONOMY

THE JUMPING FROG

JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE

THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY

THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY

A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE

NIAGARA

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

TO RAISE POULTRY

EXPERIENCE OF THE MCWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS
CROUP

MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK

THE OFFICE BORE

JOHNNY GREER

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT

THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER

DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY

THE JUDGES “SPIRITED WOMAN"

INFORMATION WANTED

SOME LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS

MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP

A FASHION ITEM

RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT

A FINE OLD MAN

SCIENCE vs. LUCK

THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

MR. BLOKE’S ITEM

A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT

AFTER-DINNER SPEECH

LIONIZING MURDERERS

A NEW CRIME

A CURIOUS DREAM

A TRUE STORY

THE SIAMESE TWINS

SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON

A GHOST STORY

THE CAPITOLINE VENUS

SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE

JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK

HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER

THE PETRIFIED MAN

MY BLOODY MASSACRE

THE UNDERTAKER’S CHAT

CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS

AURELIA’S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN

"AFTER” JENKINS

ABOUT BARBERS

"PARTY CRIES” IN IRELAND

THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

HONORED AS A CURIOSITY

FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD

CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS

THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR “LOCALIZED"

THE WIDOW’S PROTEST

THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST

CURING A COLD

A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION

RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR

A MYSTERIOUS VISIT

SKETCHES NEW AND OLD

Part 1.

MY WATCH

AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE—[Written about 1870.]

My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or
gaining, and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had
come to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to
consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one

night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized
messenger and forerunner 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 time, and
the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to set it
for me. 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
perfect 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 went up to a hundred and fifty in the shade. At
the end of two months it had left all the timepieces of the town far in the
rear, and was a fraction over thirteen days ahead of the almanac. It was
away into November enjoying the snow, while the October leaves were still
turning. It hurried up house rent, bills payable, and such things, in such a
ruinous way that I could not abide it. I took it to the watchmaker to be
regulated. He asked me if I had ever had it repaired. I said no, it had never
needed any repairing. He looked a look of vicious happiness and eagerly
pried 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 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 against it. But the rest of the day it would keep on slowing
down and fooling along until all the clocks it had left behind caught up
again. So at last, at the end of twenty-four hours, it would trot up to the

judges’ stand all right and just in time. It would show a fair and square
average, and no man could say it had done more or less than its duty. But a
correct average is only a mild virtue in a watch, and I took this instrument
to another watchmaker. He said the king-bolt was broken. I said I was glad
it was nothing more serious. To tell the plain truth, I had no idea what the
king-bolt was, but I did not choose to appear ignorant to a stranger.

He repaired the king-bolt, but what the watch gained in one way it lost in
another. It would run awhile and then stop awhile, and then run awhile
again, and so on, using its own discretion about the intervals. And every
time it went off it kicked back like a musket. I padded my breast for a few
days, but finally took the watch to another watchmaker. 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 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 mainspring was not straight. He also remarked that part of the
works needed half-soling. He made these things all right, and then my
timepiece performed unexceptionably, 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.

POLITICAL ECONOMY

Political Economy 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 informed that a stranger wished to see me
down at the door. I went and confronted 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. He said he was sorry to disturb me, but 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 up for me. 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 offhand way that I had been
intending for some time to have six or eight lightning-rods put up, but—The
stranger started, and looked inquiringly 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 was a novice. I told him
to put up eight “points,” and put them all on the roof, and use the best
quality 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 could
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—

[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 there was a state of things
to make a man glad to be alive; and added, “I leave it to you if you ever saw
anything 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’oeil’ a soothing uniformity of achievement which would allay the
excitement naturally consequent upon the ‘coup d’etat.’” 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 would 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 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 dictionary. 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 the
human mind was capable of consuming; and even our own
Greeley had said vaguely but forcibly that “Political—

[Here the lightning-rod man sent up another call for me. I went down in a
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! Put a dozen on the 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-brake! Move! Use up all the
material you can get your hands on, and when you run out of lightning-rods
put up ramrods, cam-rods, stair-rods, piston-rods—anything 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 wrist-bands
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 is nearest to my heart and dearest to my
brain of all this world’s philosophy.]

economy 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 coelum,
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 establishment,’ did I understand you to say? I will step down and
critically observe this popular ebullition of ignorance.”]
THREE 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 theaters languished, 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
thunderstorm came up and the lightning began to “go for” my house, as the
historian Josephus quaintly phrases it. It cleared the galleries, 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
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 advantage of the pyrotechnic display that was making my house so
magnificently conspicuous 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
transporting 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 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. I am not even yet settled enough
in nerve and brain to resume it.
TO WHOM IT 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.

THE JUMPING FROG

[written about 1865]

IN ENGLISH. THEN IN FRENCH. THEN CLAWED BACK
INTO A CIVILIZED LANGUAGE ONCE MORE BY
PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL.

Even 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 Magazine entitled, ‘Revue des Deux Mondes’
(Review of Some Two Worlds), wherein the writer treats of “Les
Humoristes Americaines” (These Humorist Americans). I am one of these
humorist American 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 sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or
not). It is a very good article and the writer says all manner of kind and
complimentary things about me—for which I am sure I thank him with all
my heart; but then why should he go and spoil all his praise by one unlucky
experiment? What I refer to is this: he says my Jumping Frog is a funny
story, but still he can’t see why it should ever really convulse any one 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 like a 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 even the unlettered
may know my injury and give me their compassion, I have been at infinite
pains and trouble to retranslate 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 retranslation, 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 retranslation from the French]

THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS
COUNTY
[Pronounced Cal-e-va-ras]

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from
the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and
inquired after my friend’s friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do,
and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas
W. Smiley is a myth that my friend never knew such a personage; and that
he only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind
him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to
death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as
it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it succeeded.

I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the
dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Angel’s, and I noticed
that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning
gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up, and
gave me good day. I told him that a friend of mine had commissioned me to
make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named
Leonidas W. Smiley—Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, a young minister of the
Gospel, who he had heard was at one time resident of Angel’s Camp. I
added that if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas
W. Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him.
Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his
chair, and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which
follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never
changed his voice from the gentle flowing key to which he tuned his initial
sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all
through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive

earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his
imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he
regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men
of transcendent genius in ‘finesse.’ I let him go on in his own way, and
never interrupted him once.
“Rev. Leonidas W. H’m, Reverend Le—well, there was a feller here,
once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of ‘49—or maybe it was the
spring of ‘50—I don’t recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me
think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume warn’t
finished when he first come to the camp; but anyway, he was the curiousest
man about always 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 him any way just so’s
he got a bet, he 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 solit’ry thing mentioned but that feller’d offer
to bet on it, and take any 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
first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg’lar to bet on
Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so
he was too, and a good man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go
anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to—to
wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that
straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for
and how long he was on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that
Smiley, and can tell you about him. Why, it never made no difference to
him—he’d bet on any thing—the dangdest feller. Parson Walker’s wife laid
very sick once, for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn’t going to
save her; but one morning he come in, and Smiley up and asked him how
she was, and he said she was considerable better—thank the Lord for his

inf’nite 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
something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards’
start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag end of the race she
get excited and desperate like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and
scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out
to one side among the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust and raising m-o-
r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose—and
always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could
cipher it down.
“And he had a little small bull-pup, that to look at him you’d think he
warn’t worth a cent but to set around and look ornery and lay for a chance
to steal something. But as soon as money was up on him he was a different
dog; his under-jaw’d begin to stick out like the fo’castle of a steamboat, and
his teeth would uncover and shine like the furnaces. And a dog might tackle
him and bully-rag him, and bite him, and throw him over his shoulder two
or three times, and Andrew Jackson—which was the name of the pup—
Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was 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 j’int 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 didn’t have no hind legs, because they’d
been sawed off in a circular saw, and when the thing had gone along far
enough, and the money was all up, and he come to make a snatch for his pet
holt, he see in a minute how he’d been imposed on, and how the other dog
had him in the door, so to speak, and he ’peared surprised, and then he
looked sorter discouraged-like and didn’t try no more to win the fight, and
so he got shucked out bad. He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his
heart was broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn’t no
hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight,

and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died. It was a good pup,
was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he’d
lived, for the stuff was in him and he had genius—I know it, because he
hadn’t no opportunities to speak of, and it don’t stand to reason that a dog
could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances if he hadn’t
no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of
his’n, and the way it turned out.
“Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tomcats
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 maybe a couple, if he got a
good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him
up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep’ him in practice so constant,
that he’d nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley said all a
frog wanted was education, and he could do ’most anything—and I believe
him. Why, I’ve seen him set Dan’l Webster down here on this floor—Dan’l
Webster was the name of the frog—and sing out, ‘Flies, Dan’l, flies!’ and
quicker’n you could wink he’d spring straight up and snake a fly off’n the
counter there, and flop down on the floor ag’in as solid as a gob of mud,
and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as
if he hadn’t no idea he’d been doin’ any more’n any frog might do. You
never see a frog so modest and straightfor’ard as he was, for all he was so
gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he
could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed
you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand;
and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he
had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be,
for fellers that had traveled and been everywheres all said he laid over any
frog that ever they see.

“Well, Smiley kep’ the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch
him down-town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller—a stranger in
the camp, he was—come acrost him with his box, and says:
“‘What might it be that you’ve got in the box?’
“And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, ‘It might be a parrot, or it
might be a canary, maybe, but it ain’t—it’s only just a frog.’
“And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this
way and that, and says, ‘H’m—so ’tis. Well, what’s HE good for.
“‘Well,’ Smiley says, easy and careless, ‘he’s good enough for one thing,
I should judge—he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.
“The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look,
and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I
don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.’
“‘Maybe you don’t,’ Smiley says. ‘Maybe you understand frogs and
maybe you don’t understand ’em; maybe you’ve had experience, and
maybe you ain’t only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I’ve got my opinion,
and I’ll resk forty dollars thet he can outjump any frog in Calaveras
County.’

“And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad-like, ‘Well,
I’m only a stranger here, and I ain’t got no frog; but if I had a frog, I’d bet
you.
“And then Smiley says, ‘That’s all right—that’s all right if you’ll hold my
box a minute, I’ll go and get you a frog.’ And so the feller took the box, and
put up his forty dollars along with Smiley’s, and set down to wait.
“So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to himself 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 I’ll give the word.’ Then he says, One-two-three
—git’ and him and the feller touches up the frogs from behind, and the new
frog hopped off lively but Dan’l give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders
—so—like a Frenchman, but it warn’t no use—he couldn’t budge; he was
planted as solid as a church, and he couldn’t no more stir than if he was
anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was disgusted too,
but he didn’t have no idea what the matter was of course.
“The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out
at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder—so—at Dan’l, and
says again, very deliberate, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I don’t see no p’ints about that
frog that’s any better’n any other frog.’
“Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan’l a long
time, and at last he says, ‘I do wonder what in the nation 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
—”

[Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got
up to see what was wanted.] And turning to me as he moved away, he said:
“Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy—I ain’t going to be gone a
second.”
But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the
enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much
information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started away.
At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me
and recommenced:
“Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no
tail, only just 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.]

.......................

THE JUMPING FROG

[From the Revue des Deux Mondes, of July 15th, 1872.]

.......................

LA GRENOUILLE SAUTEUSE DU COMTE DE CALAVERAS
“—Il y avait, une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim Smiley:
c'était dans l’hiver de 49, peut-être bien au printemps de 50, je ne me
reappelle pas exactement. Ce qui me fait croire que 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 premiére fois, mais de toutes facons il était l’homme le
plus friand de paris qui se pût voir, pariant sur tout ce qui se présentait,
quand il pouvait trouver un adversaire, et, quand n’en trouvait pas il passait
du côté opposé. Tout ce qui convenait à l’autre lui convenait; pourvu qu’il
eût un pari, Smiley était satisfait. Et il avait une chance! une chance inouie:
presque toujours il gagnait. It faut dire qu’il était toujours prêt à s’exposer,
qu’on ne pouvait mentionner la moindre chose sans que ce gaillard offrît de
parier là-dessus n’importe quoi et de prendre le côte que l’on voudrait,
comme je vous le disais tout à l’heure. S’il y avait des courses, vous le
trouviez riche ou ruiné à 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 aviat ‘meeting’ au camp, il
venait parier régulièrement pour le curé Walker, qu’il jugeait être le
meilleur prédicateur des environs, et qui l'était en effet, et un brave homme.
Il aurait rencontré une punaise de bois en chemin, qu’il aurait parié sur le
temps qu’il lui faudrait pour aller où elle voudrait aller, et si vous l’aviez

pris au mot, it 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 très malade pendant longtemps, il semblait qu’on ne la sauverait
pas; mais un matin le curé arrive, et Smiley lui demande comment ella va et
il dit qu’elle est bien mieux, grâce a l’infinie miséricorde tellement mieux
qu’avec la bénédiction de la Providence elle s’en tirerait, et voilá que, sans
y penser, Smiley répond:—Eh bien! je gage deux et demi qu’elle mourra
tout de même.
“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 ca! Et il avait coutume de gagner de l’argent
avec cette bête, quoi-qu’elle fût 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 à la fin elle ne manquait de s'échauffer, de s’exaspérer et elle arrivait,
s'écartant, se défendant, ses jambes grêles en l’air devant les obstacles,
quelquefois les évitant et faisant avec cela plus de poussière qu’aucun
cheval, plus de bruit surtout avec ses éternumens et reniflemens.—-crac!
elle arrivait donc toujours première d’une tête, aussi juste qu’on peut le
mesurer. Et il avait un petit bouledogue qui, à le voir, ne valait pas un sou;
on aurait cru que parier contre lui c'était voler, tant il était ordinaire; mais
aussitôt les enjeux faits, il devenait un autre chien. Sa mâchoire inférieure
commencait à ressortir comme un gaillard d’avant, ses dents se
découvcraient brillantes commes 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 le nom du chien, André Jackson prenait cela
tranquillement, comme s’il ne se fût jamais attendu à autre chose, et quand
les paris étaient doublés et redoublés contre lui, il vous saisissait l’autre
chien juste à l’articulation de la jambe de derrière, et il ne la lâchait plus,
non pas qu’il la mâchât, vous concevez, mais il s’y serait tenu pendu jusqu'à
ce qu’on jetât l'éponge en l’air, fallût-il attendre un an. Smiley gagnait
toujours avec cette bête-là; malheureusement ils ont fini par dresser un
chien qui n’avait pas de pattes de derrière, parce qu’on les avait sciées, et
quand les choses furent au point qu’il voulait, et qu’il en vint à 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
l’air plus penaud et plus découragé; il ne fit aucun effort pour gagner le

combat et fut rudement secoué, de sorte que, regardant Smiley comme pour
lui dire:—Mon coeur est brisé, c’est ta faute; pourquoi m’avoir livré à un
chien qui n’a pas de pattes de derrière, puisque c’est par là que je les bats?
—il s’en alla en clopinant, et se coucha pour mourir. Ah! c'était un bon
chien, cet 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 la sais, bien que de grandes
occasions lui aient manqué; mais il est impossible de supposer qu’un chien
capable de se battre comme lui, certaines circonstances étant données, ait
manqué de talent. Je me sens triste toutes les fois que je pense à son dernier
combat et au dénoûment qu’il a eu. Eh bien! ce Smiley nourrissait des
terriers à rats, et des coqs combat, et des chats, et toute sorte de choses, au
point qu’il était toujours en mesure de vous tenir tête, et qu’avec sa rage de
paris on n’avait plus de repos. Il attrapa un jour une grenouille et l’emporta
chez lui, disant qu’il prétendait faire son éducation; vous me croirez si vous
voulez, mais pendant trois mois il n’a rien fait que lui apprendre à sauter
dans une cour retirée de sa maison. Et je vous réponds qu’il avait reussi. Il
lui donnait un petit coup par derrière, et l’instant d’après vous voyiez la
grenouille tourner en l’air comme un beignet au-dessus de la poêle, faire
une culbute, quelquefois deux, lorsqu’elle était bien partie, et retomber sur
ses pattes comme un chat. Il l’avait dressée dans l’art de gober des
mouches, er 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 à une grenouille, c'était l'éducation, qu’avec
l'éducation elle pouvait faire presque tout, et je le crois. Tenez, je l’ai vu
poser Daniel Webster là sur se plancher,—Daniel Webster était le nom de la
grenouille,—et lui chanter: Des mouches! Daniel, des mouches!—En un
clin d’oeil, Daniel avait bondi et saisi une mouche ici sur le comptoir, puis
sauté de nouveau par terre, où il restait vraiment à se gratter la tête avec sa
patte de derrière, comme s’il n’avait pas eu la moindre idée de sa
superiorité. Jamais vous n’avez grenouille vu de aussi modeste, aussi
naturelle, douee comme elle l'était! Et quand il s’agissait de sauter purement
et simplement sur terrain plat, elle faisait plus de chemin en un saut
qu’aucune bete de son espèce que vous puissiez connaître. Sauter à plat,
c'était son fort! Quand il s’agissait de cela, Smiley entassait les enjeux sur
elle tant qu’il lui, restait un rouge liard. Il faut le reconnaitre, Smiley était
monstrueusement fier de sa grenouille, et il en avait le droit, car des gens
qui avaient voyagé, qui avaient tout vu, disaient qu’on lui ferait injure de la

comparer à une autre; de facon que Smiley gardait Daniel dans une petite
boîte a claire-voie qu’il emportait parfois à la Ville pour quelque pari.
“Un jour, un individu étranger au camp l’arrête aver sa boîte et lui dit:—
Qu’est-ce que vous avez donc serré là dedans?
“Smiley dit d’un air indifférent:—Cela pourrait être un perroquet ou un
serin, mais ce n’est rien de pareil, ce n’est qu’une grenouille.
“L’individu la prend, la regarde avec soin, la tourne d’un côté et de
l’autre puis il dit.—Tiens! en effet! A quoi estelle bonne?
“—Mon Dieu! répond Smiley, toujours d’un air dégagé, elle est bonne
pour une chose à mon avis, elle peut battre en sautant toute grenouille du
comté de Calaveras.
“L’individu reprend la boîte, l’examine de nouveau longuement, et la
rend à 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 grenouilles, possible que vous ne vous y entendez point,
possible que vous avez de l’expérience, et possible que vous ne soyez qu’un
amateur. De toute manière, je parie quarante dollars qu’elle battra en sautant
n’importe quelle grenouille du comté de Calaveras.
“L’individu réfléchit une seconde et dit comme attristé:—Je ne suis qu’un
étranger ici, je n’ai pas de grenouille; mais, si j’en avais une, je tiendrais le
pari.
“—Fort bien! répond Smiley. Rien de plus facile. Si vous voulez tenir ma
boîte une minute, j’irai vous chercher une grenouille.—Voilà donc
l’individu qui garde la boîte, qui met ses quarante dollars sur ceux de
Smiley et qui attend. Il attend assez longtemps, réflechissant tout seul, et
figurez-vous qu’il prend Daniel, lui ouvre la bouche de force at avec une
cuiller à 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 à barboter
dans une mare. Finalement il attrape une grenouille, l’apporte à cet individu
et dit:—Maintenant, si vous êtes prêt, mettez-la tout contra Daniel, avec
leurs pattes de devant sur la même ligne, et je donnerai le signal; puis il
ajoute:—Un, deux, trois, sautez!
“Lui et l’individu touchent leurs grenouilles par derrière, et la grenouille
neuve se met à sautiller, mais Daniel se soulève lourdement, hausse les

épaules ainsi, comme un Francais; à quoi bon? il ne pouvait bouger, il était
planté solide comma une enclume, il n’avancait pas plus que si on l’eût mis
à l’ancre. Smiley fut surpris et dégoûté, mais il ne se doutait pas du tour,
bien entendu. L’individu empoche l’argent, s’en va, et en s’en allant est-ce
qu’il ne donna pas un coup de pouce par-dessus l'épaule, comma ca, au
pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air délibéré:—Eh bien! je ne vois pas qua
cette grenouille ait rien de muiex qu’une autre.
“Smiley se gratta longtemps la tête, les yeux fixés sur Daniel; jusqu'à ce
qu’enfin il dit:—Je me demande comment diable il se fait que cette bête ait
refusé . . . Est-ce qu’elle aurait quelque chose? . . . On croirait qu’elle est
enfleé.
“Il empoigne Daniel par la peau du cou, le souléve et dit:—Le loup me
croque, s’il ne pèse pas cinq livres.
“Il le retourne, et le malheureux crache deux poignées de plomb. Quand
Smiley reconnut ce qui en était, il fut comme fou. Vous le voyez d’ici poser
sa grenouille par terra 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 ‘89, 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
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 à l’heure). If it there was of races, you him find rich
or ruined at the end; if it, there is a combat of dogs, he bring his bet; he
himself laid always for a combat of cats, for a combat of cocks —by-blue!
If you have see two birds upon a fence, he you should have offered of to bet

which of those birds shall fly the first; and if there is meeting at the camp
(meeting au camp) he comes to bet regularly for the curé Walker, which he
judged to be the best predicator of the neighborhood (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 cure
Walker is very sick during long time, it seemed that one not her saved not;
but one morning the cure arrives, and Smiley him demanded how she goes,
and he said that she is well better, grace to the infinite misery (lui demande
comment elle va, et il dit qu’elle est bien mieux, grâce a l’infinie
miséricorde) so much better that 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 defendant, her legs greles in the air before
the obstacles, sometimes them elevating and making with this more of dust
than any horse, more of noise above with his eternumens and reniflemens—
crac! she arrives then always first by one head, as just as one can it
measure. And he had a small bulldog (bouledogue!) 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 seize 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-là;
unhappily they have finished by elevating a dog who no had not of feet of
behind, because one them had sawed; and when things were at the point
that he would, and that he came to himself throw upon his morsel favorite,
the poor dog comprehended in an instant that he himself was deceived in
him, and that the other dog him had. You no have never seen person having
the air more penaud and more discouraged; he not made no effort to gain
the combat, and was rudely shucked.
Eh bien! this Smiley nourished some terriers à rats, and some cocks of
combat, and some cats, and all sorts of things; and with his rage of betting
one no had more of repose. He trapped one day a frog and him imported
with him (et l’emporta chez lui) saying that he pretended to make his
education. You me believe if you will, but during three months he not has
nothing done but to him apprehend to jump (apprendre à sauter) in a court
retired of her mansion (de sa 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 refall 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 them shut up there within?”
Smiley said, with an air indifferent:
“That could be a paroquet, or a syringe (ou un serin), but this no is
nothing of such, it not is but a frog.”
The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side and
from the other, then he said:
“Tiens! in effect!—At what is she good?”
“My God!” respond Smiley, always with an air disengaged, “she is good
for one thing, to my notice (à mon avis), she can batter in jumping (elle peut
battre en sautant) all frogs of the county of Calaveras.”
The individual retook the box, it examined of new longly, and it rendered
to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate:
“Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each
frog.” (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu’aucune
grenouille.) [If that isn’t grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no
judge.—M. T.]
“Possible that you not it saw not,” said Smiley, “possible that you—you
comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;
possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but an
amateur. Of all manner (De toute manière) 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:
“I not am but a stranger here, I no have not a frog; but if I of it had one, I
would embrace the bet.”
“Strong well!” respond Smiley; “nothing of more facility. If you will
hold my box a minute, I go you to search a frog (j’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 long times, reflecting all solely. And figure you that he takes Daniel,
him opens the mouth by force and with a teaspoon him fills with shot of the
hunt, even him fills just to the chin, then he him puts by the earth. Smiley
during these times was at slopping in a swamp. Finally he trapped (attrape)
a frog, him carried to that individual, and said:
“Now if you be ready, put him all against Daniel with their before feet
upon the same line, and I give the signal”—then he added: “One, two, three
—advance!”
Him and the individual touched their frogs by behind, and the frog new
put to jump smartly, but Daniel himself lifted ponderously, exalted the
shoulders thus, like a Frenchman—to what good? he not could budge, he is
planted solid like a church, he not advance no more than if one him had put
at the anchor.
Smiley was surprised and disgusted, but he no 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 l'épaule, comme ça, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son
air délibéré):
“Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another.”
Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel,
until that which at last he said:
“I me demand how the devil it makes itself that this beast has refused. Is
it that she had something? One would believe that she is stuffed.”
He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said:
“The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds:”
He him reversed and the unhappy belched two handfuls of shot (et le
malheureux, etc.). When Smiley recognized how it was, he was like mad.
He deposited his frog by the earth and ran after that individual, but he not
him caught never.
Such is the Jumping Frog, to the distorted French eye. I claim that I never
put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium tremens
in my life. And what has a poor foreigner like me done, to be abused and

misrepresented like this? When I say, “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that
frog that’s any better’n any other frog,” is it kind, is it just, for this
Frenchman to try to make it appear that I said, “Eh bien! I no saw not that
that frog had nothing of better than each frog”? I have no heart to write
more. I never felt so about anything before.
HARTFORD, March, 1875.

JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE

[written about 1871]

The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly
down upon a correspondent who posted him as a Radical:
—“While he was writing the first word, the middle, dotting

his i’s, crossing his t’s, and punching his period, he knew he
was concocting a sentence that was saturated with infamy
and reeking with falsehood.”—Exchange.

I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my
health, and so I went down to Tennessee, and got a berth on the Morning
Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate editor. When I went on
duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair with
his feet on a pine table. There was another pine table in the room and
another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers and
scraps and sheets of manuscript. There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled
with cigar stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door hanging by its
upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock-coat on,
and white linen pants. His boots were small and neatly blacked. He wore a
ruffled shirt, a large seal-ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a
checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down. Date of costume about
1848. He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing
his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling fearfully,
and I judged that he was 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 Earthquake will, of course, take pleasure in making
the correction.

John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville
Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, arrived in the city
yesterday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House.

We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs
Morning Howl has fallen into the error of supposing that the
election of Van Werter is not an established fact, but he will
have discovered his mistake before this reminder reaches
him, no doubt. He was 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!”
I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plow
through another man’s verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was in
the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and
marred the symmetry of my ear.
“Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano—he
was due yesterday.” And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired
—Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith’s aim, who was
just taking a second chance and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a
finger shot off.
Then the chief editor went on with his erasure; 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, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.”
I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till
its mother wouldn’t have known it if it had had one. It now read as follows:

SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS

The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are
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 Springs
Morning Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for
lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born
mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate
error; to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public
morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more

virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier,
and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades
his great office persistently to the dissemination of
falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.

Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement—it wants a jail
and a poorhouse more. The idea of a pavement in a one-
horse town composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop,
and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah!
The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is
braying about his business with his customary imbecility,
and imagining that he is talking sense.

“Now that is the way to write—peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk
journalism gives me the fan-tods.”
About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering
crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved out of
range—I began to feel in the way.
The chief said, “That was the Colonel, likely. I’ve been expecting him for
two days. He will be up now right away.”
He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward
with a dragoon revolver in his hand.
He said, “Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this
mangy sheet?”
“You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is gone. I
believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Colonel Blatherskite
Tecumseh?”
“Right, Sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are at leisure
we will begin.”
“I have an article on the ‘Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual
Development in America’ to finish, but there is no hurry. Begin.”
Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief
lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel’s bullet ended its career in the fleshy
part of my thigh. The Colonel’s left shoulder was clipped a little. They fired
again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the

arm. At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a
knuckle chipped. I then said, I believed I would go out and take a walk, as
this was a private matter, and I had a delicacy about participating in it
further. But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat, and assured me
that I was not in the way.
They then talked about the elections and the crops while they reloaded,
and I fell to tying up my wounds. But presently they opened fire again with
animation, and every shot took effect—but it is proper to remark that five
out of the six fell to my share. The sixth one mortally wounded the Colonel,
who remarked, with fine humor, that he would have to say good morning
now, as he had business uptown. He then inquired the way to the
undertaker’s and left.
The chief turned to me and said, “I am expecting company to dinner, and
shall have to get ready. It will be a favor to me if you will read proof and
attend to the customers.”
I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was too
bewildered by the fusillade that was still ringing in my ears to think of
anything to say.
He continued, “Jones will be here at three—cowhide him. Gillespie will
call earlier, perhaps—throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be along
about four—kill him. That is all for today, I believe. If you have any odd
time, you may write a blistering article on the police—give the chief
inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in the drawer—
ammunition there in the corner—lint and bandages up there in the
pigeonholes. In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon, downstairs. 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
glimmering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes there was
silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin
that strewed the floor around us.

He said, “You’ll like this place when you get used to it.”
I said, “I’ll have to get you to excuse me; I think maybe I might write to
suit you after a while; as soon as I had had some practice and learned the
language I am confident I could. But, to speak the plain truth, that sort of
energy of expression has its 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 bombshell
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 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 Tennesseean 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.

THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY

[written about 1865]

Once 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 toward him when she was gone. Most
bad boys in the Sunday books are named James, and have sick mothers,
who teach them to say, “Now, I lay me down,” etc., and sing them to sleep
with sweet, 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 leave him.

Once this little bad boy stole the key of the pantry, and slipped in there
and helped himself to some jam, and filled up the vessel with tar, so that his
mother would never know the difference; but all at once a terrible feeling
didn’t come over him, and something didn’t seem to whisper to him, “Is it
right to disobey my mother? Isn’t it sinful to do this? Where do bad little
boys go who gobble up their good kind mother’s jam?” and then he didn’t
kneel down all alone and promise never to be wicked any more, and rise up
with a light, happy heart, and go and tell his mother all about it, and beg her
forgiveness, and be blessed by her with tears of pride and thankfulness in
her eyes. No; that is the way with all other bad boys in the books; but it
happened otherwise with this Jim, strangely enough. He ate that jam, and
said it was bully, in his sinful, vulgar way; and he put in the tar, and said
that was bully also, and laughed, and observed “that the old woman would
get up and snort” when she found it out; and when she did find it out, he
denied knowing anything about it, and she whipped him severely, and he
did the crying himself. Everything about this boy was curious—everything
turned out differently with him from the way it does to the bad 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 sickbed 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 penknife, and, when he was afraid it would be
found out and he would get whipped, he slipped it into George Wilson’s cap
—poor Widow Wilson’s son, the moral boy, the good little boy of the
village, who always obeyed his mother, and never told an untruth, and was
fond of his lessons, and infatuated with Sunday-school. And when the knife

dropped from the cap, and poor George hung his head and blushed, as if in
conscious guilt, and the grieved teacher charged the theft upon him, and
was just in the very act of bringing the switch down upon his trembling
shoulders, a white-haired, improbable justice of the peace did not suddenly
appear in their midst, and strike an attitude and say, “Spare this noble boy—
there stands the cowering culprit! I was passing the school door at recess,
and, unseen myself, I saw the theft committed!” And then Jim didn’t get
whaled, and the venerable justice didn’t read the tearful school a homily,
and take George by the hand and say such a boy deserved to be exalted, and
then tell him to come and make his home with him, and sweep out the
office, and make fires, and run errands, and chop wood, and study law, and
help his wife 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 didn’t happen that way to Jim. No
meddling old clam of a justice dropped in to make trouble, and so the model
boy George got thrashed, and Jim was glad of it because, you know, Jim
hated moral boys. Jim said he was “down on them 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
boating on Sunday, and didn’t get drowned, and that other time that he got
caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn’t get
struck by lightning. Why, you might look, and look, all through the Sunday-
school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never come
across anything like this. Oh, no; you would find that all the bad boys who
go boating on Sunday invariably get drowned; and all the bad boys who get
caught out in storms when they are fishing on Sunday infallibly get struck
by lightning. Boats with bad boys in them always upset on Sunday, and it
always storms when bad boys go fishing on the Sabbath. How this Jim ever
escaped is a mystery to me.

This Jim bore a charmed life—that must have been the way of it. Nothing
could hurt him. He even gave the elephant in the menagerie a plug of
tobacco, and the elephant didn’t knock the top of his head off with his
trunk. He browsed around the cupboard after essence-of peppermint, and
didn’t make a mistake and drink aqua fortis. He stole his father’s gun and
went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn’t shoot three or four of his fingers
off. He struck his little sister on the temple with his fist when he was angry,
and she didn’t linger in pain through long summer days, and die with sweet
words of forgiveness upon her lips that redoubled the anguish of his
breaking heart. No; she got over it. He ran off and went to sea at last, and
didn’t come back and find himself sad and alone in the world, his loved
ones sleeping in the quiet churchyard, and the vine-embowered home of his
boyhood tumbled down and gone to decay. Ah, no; he came home as drunk
as a piper, and got into the station-house the first thing.
And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them
all with an ax 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.

THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY

[Written about 1865]

Once 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 ridiculous.
The curious ways that that Jacob had, surpassed everything. He wouldn’t
play marbles on Sunday, he wouldn’t rob birds’ nests, he wouldn’t give hot
pennies to organ-grinders’ monkeys; he didn’t seem to take any interest in
any kind of rational amusement. So the other boys used to try to reason it
out and come to an understanding of him, but they couldn’t arrive at any
satisfactory conclusion. As I said before, they could only figure out a sort of
vague idea that he was “afflicted,” and 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 handkerchiefs that
had as much as a yard and a half of stuff in them. He was always headed off
in this way. He never could see one of those good little boys on account of
his always dying in the last chapter.
Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book. He
wanted to be put in, with pictures representing him gloriously declining to
lie to his mother, and her weeping for joy about it; and pictures representing
him standing on the doorstep giving a penny to a poor beggar-woman with
six children, and telling her to spend it freely, but not to be extravagant,
because extravagance is a sin; and pictures of him magnanimously refusing
to tell on the bad boy who always lay in wait for him around the corner as
he came from school, and welted him over the head with a lath, and then
chased him home, saying, “Hi! hi!” as he proceeded. 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 sometimes when he reflected that the

good little boys always died. He loved to live, you know, and this was the
most unpleasant feature about being a 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 course, he had to make up his mind to do the best he
could under the circumstances—to live right, and hang on as long as he
could, and have his dying speech all ready when his time came.
But somehow nothing ever went right with the good little boy; nothing
ever turned out with him the way it turned out with the good little boys in
the books. They always had a good time, and the bad boys had the broken
legs; but in his case there was a screw loose somewhere, and it all happened
just the other way. When he found Jim Blake stealing apples, and went
under the tree to read to him about the bad little boy who fell out of a
neighbor’s apple tree and broke his arm, Jim fell out of the tree, too, but he
fell on him and broke his arm, and Jim wasn’t hurt at all. Jacob couldn’t
understand that. There wasn’t 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 he would like to catch him shoving him 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 sailboat. 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 abed 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 dumfounded.
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 go in a
book, but he hadn’t yet reached the allotted term of life for good little boys,
and he hoped to be able to make a record yet if he could hold on till his time
was fully up. If everything else failed he had his dying speech to fall back
on.
He examined his authorities, and found that it was now time for him to
go to sea as a cabin-boy. He called on a ship-captain and made his
application, and when the captain asked for his recommendations he
proudly drew out a tract and pointed to the word, “To Jacob Blivens, from
his affectionate teacher.” But the captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and he
said, “Oh, that be blowed! that wasn’t any proof that he 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
he had read. He could hardly believe his senses.

This boy always had a hard time of it. Nothing ever came out according
to the authorities with him. At last, one day, when he was around hunting up
bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot of them in the old iron-foundry
fixing up a little joke on fourteen or fifteen dogs, which they had tied
together in long procession, and were going to ornament with empty
nitroglycerin cans made fast to their tails. Jacob’s heart was touched. He sat
down on one of those cans (for he never minded grease when duty was
before him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by the collar, and turned
his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones. But just at that moment
Alderman McWelter, full of wrath, stepped in. All the bad boys ran away,
but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and began one of those
stately little Sunday-school-book speeches which always commence with
“Oh, sir!” in dead opposition to the fact that no boy, good or bad, ever starts
a remark with “Oh, sir.” But the alderman never waited to hear the rest. He
took Jacob Blivens by the ear and turned him around, and hit him a whack
in the rear with the flat of his hand; and in an instant that good little boy

shot out through the roof and soared away toward 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.—[This glycerin catastrophe is borrowed from a floating
newspaper item, whose author’s name I would give if I knew it.—M. T.]
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.

A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND
MOORE

[written about 1865]

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 year’s lot!

Those joyous beans are passed away;
Those onions blithe, O where are they?
Once loved, lost, mourned—now vexing ILLS
Your shades troop back in annual bills!

And so ’twill be when I’m aground
These yearly duns will still go round,
While other bards, with frantic quills,
Shall damn and damn these annual bills!

NIAGARA

[written about 1871]

Niagara Falls is a most enjoyable place of resort. The hotels are excellent,
and the prices not at all exorbitant. The opportunities for fishing are not
surpassed in the country; in fact, they are not even equaled elsewhere.
Because, in other localities, certain places in the streams are much better

than others; but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the
reason that the fish do not bite anywhere, and so there is no use in your
walking five miles to fish, when you can depend on being just as
unsuccessful nearer home. The advantages of this state of things have never
heretofore been properly placed before the public.
The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant
and none of them fatiguing. When you start out to “do” the Falls you first
drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of looking
down from a precipice 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, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids—how first one
paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows and then the other,
and at what point it was that her smokestack toppled overboard, and where
her planking began to break and part asunder—and how she did finally live
through the trip, after accomplishing the incredible feat of traveling
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 to 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 onto 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
photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an
ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your
solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the light
of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime
Niagara; and a great many people have the incredible effrontery or the
native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.

Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see 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 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 sackful of small reptiles was deemed
temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world’s unnoted myriads, and
will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages after they shall have
gathered themselves to their blood-relations, the other worms, and been
mingled with the unremembering dust.
There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to
display one’s marvelous 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, and still kept on winding long after the
thing ceased to be a novelty, and then terminated long before it had begun
to be a pleasure. We were then well down under the precipice, but still
considerably above the level of the river.
We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our
persons shielded from 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 progress was mostly in the
nature of groping. Now a 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 from above, and speech was in
vain in the midst of such a pitiless crash of sound.

In another moment the guide disappeared behind the deluge, and,
bewildered by the thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by
the arrowy tempest of rain, I followed. All was darkness. Such a mad
storming, roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed
my ears before. I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my
back. The world seemed going to destruction. I could not see anything, the
flood poured down 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. I never was so scared before and survived it. But we got through at
last, and emerged into the open day, where we could stand in front of the
laced and frothy and seething world of descending water, and look at it.
When I saw how much of it there was, and how fearfully in earnest it was, I
was sorry I had gone behind it.
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 beadwork, 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:
“Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a-Whack happy? Does the
great Speckled Thunder sigh for the war-path, or is his heart contented with
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 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 boring a hole through his abdomen to put his bow
through. I hesitated a moment, and then addressed her:
“Is the heart of the forest maiden heavy? Is the Laughing Tadpole lonely?
Does she mourn over the extinguished council-fires of her race, and the
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 ought 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 warpath.”
I made one more attempt to fraternize 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 property of
others has gotten you into trouble. Misrepresenting facts, in your simple
innocence, has damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper. Trading
for forty-rod 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.
For shame! Remember your ancestors! Recall their mighty deeds!
Remember Uncas!—and Red jacket! and Hole in the Day!—and
Whoopdedoodledo! Emulate their achievements! Unfurl yourselves under
my banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes—”
“Down wid him!” “Scoop the blaggard!” “Burn him!” “Hang him!”
“Dhround him!”
It was the quickest operation that ever was. I simply saw a sudden flash
in the air of clubs, 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:
“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 so time the occurrence as to throw my
custom into the hands of the opposition coroner on the American side.
At last a policeman came along, and arrested me for disturbing the peace
by yelling at people on shore for help. The judge fined me, but I had the
advantage of him. My money was with my pantaloons, and my pantaloons
were with the Indians.
Thus I escaped. I am now lying in a very critical condition. At least I am
lying anyway—-critical or not critical. I am hurt all over, but I cannot tell
the full extent yet, because the doctor is not done taking inventory. He will

make out my manifest this evening. However, thus far he thinks only
sixteen of my wounds are fatal. I don’t mind the others.
Upon regaining my right mind, I said:
“It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the beadwork and
moccasins for Niagara Falls, doctor. Where are they from?”
“Limerick, my son.”

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

[written about 1865]

“MORAL STATISTICIAN.”—I don’t want any of your statistics; I took
your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are
always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much
his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes
in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of

smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing
billiards 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 Dutchmen both drink
and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never
try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man
derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times
the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of
happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of
course you can save money by denying yourself all the little vicious
enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can
you put it to? Money can’t save your 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
contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officer full
statement of your income. Now you know 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 worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go off somewhere
and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as
“ornery” and unlovable 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 fireproof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor
stove.

“YOUNG AUTHOR.”—Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat
fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brain. 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 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 ain’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, stirin’ 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 meter as the other word of one syllable, but it sounds
better.

He’d cuss and sing and howl and pray,
And dance and drink and jest,
And lie and steal—all one to him—
He done his level best.

Whate’er this man was sot to do,
He done it with a zest;

No matter what his contract was,
HE’D DO HIS LEVEL BEST.

Verily, this man was gifted with “gorgis abilities,” and it is a happiness to
me to embalm the memory of their luster in these columns. If it were not
that the poet crop is unusually large and rank in California this year, I would
encourage you to continue writing, Simon Wheeler; but, as it is, perhaps it
might be too risky in you to enter against so much opposition.

“PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR.”—NO; you are not obliged to take
greenbacks at par.

“MELTON MOWBRAY,” Dutch Flat.—This correspondent sends a lot
of doggerel, 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.**

**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.”
There, that will do. That may be very good Dutch Flat poetry, but it won’t
do in the metropolis. It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like buttermilk
gurgling from a jug. What the people ought to have is something spirited—
something like “Johnny Comes Marching Home.” However, keep on
practising, and you may succeed yet. There is genius in you, but too much
blubber.

“ST. CLAIR HIGGINS.” Los Angeles.—“My life is a failure;
I have adored, wildly, madly, and she whom I love has

turned coldly from me and shed her affections upon another.
What would you advise me to do?”

You should set your affections on another also—or on several, if there are
enough to go round. Also, do everything you can to make your former
flame unhappy. There is an absurd idea disseminated in novels, that the
happier a girl is with another man, the happier it makes the old lover she
has blighted. Don’t allow yourself to believe any such nonsense as that. The
more cause that girl finds to regret that she did not marry you, the more
comfortable you will feel over it. It isn’t poetical, but it is mighty sound
doctrine.

“ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.—“If it would take a
cannon-ball 3 and 1/3 seconds to travel four miles, and 3
and 3/8 seconds to travel the next four, and 3 and 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 million miles?”

I don’t know.

“AMBITIOUS LEARNER,” Oakland.—Yes; you are right America was
not discovered by Alexander Selkirk.

“DISCARDED LOVER.”—“I loved, and still love, the
beautiful Edwitha Howard, and intended to marry her. Yet,
during my temporary absence at Benicia, last week, alas!
she married Jones. Is my happiness to be thus blasted for
life? Have I no redress?”

Of course you have. All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.
The intention and not the act constitutes crime—in other words, constitutes
the deed. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend it for an insult, it

is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and meaning no insult, it is not an
insult. If you discharge a pistol accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free,
for you have done no murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly
intend to kill him, but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the
intention constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder. Ergo, if you
had married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you
would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage
could not be complete without the intention. And ergo, in the strict spirit of
the law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and didn’t do it,
you are married to her all the same—because, as I said before, the intention
constitutes the crime. It is as clear as day that Edwitha is your wife, and
your redress lies in taking a club and mutilating Jones with it as much as
you can. Any man has a right to protect his own wife from the advances of
other men. But you have another alternative—you were married to Edwitha
first, because of your deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her
for bigamy, in subsequently marrying Jones. But there is another phase in
this complicated case: You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently,
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 husband 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 intention of
getting married, and therefore, of course, never had been married; and by
the same reasoning you are a bachelor, because you have never been any
one’s husband; and a married man, because you have a wife living; and to
all intents and purposes a widower, because you have been deprived of that
wife; and a consummate ass for going off to Benicia in the first place, while
things were so mixed. And by this time I have got myself so tangled up in
the intricacies of this extraordinary case that I shall have to give up any
further attempt to advise you—I might get confused and fail to make myself
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 recklessly heaving
immense solid bouquets, of the general size and weight of prize cabbages,
from the dizzy altitude of the galleries, is dangerous and very reprehensible.
Now, night before last, at the Academy of Music, just after Signorina
________ had finished that exquisite melody, “The Last Rose of Summer,”
one of these floral pile-drivers came cleaving down through the atmosphere
of applause, and if she hadn’t deployed suddenly to the right, it would have
driven her into the floor like a shinglenail. 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.

“YOUNG MOTHER.”—And so you think a baby is a thing of beauty
and a joy forever? Well, the idea is pleasing, but not original; every cow
thinks the same of its own calf. Perhaps the cow may not think it so
elegantly, but still she thinks it nevertheless. I honor the cow for it. We all
honor 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 competent to
be a joy “forever.” It pains me thus to demolish two-thirds of your pretty
sentiment in a single sentence; but the position I hold in this chair requires
that I shall not permit you to deceive and mislead the public with your
plausible figures of speech. I know a female baby, aged eighteen months, in
this city, which 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 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 whalebone cane down its throat; got it
fast there, and it was all its mother could do to pull the cane out again,
without pulling out some of the child with it. Then, being hungry for glass
again, it broke up several wine glasses, and fell to eating and swallowing
the fragments, not minding a cut or two. Then it ate a quantity of butter,
pepper, salt, and California matches, actually taking a spoonful of butter, a
spoonful of salt, a spoonful of pepper, and three or four lucifer matches at
each mouthful. (I 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 compliment to our home manufactures of more
than ordinary value, coming, as it does, from one who is too young to
flatter.) Then she washed her head with soap and water, and afterward ate
what soap was left, and drank as much of the suds as she had room for; after
which she sallied forth and took the cow familiarly by the tail, and got
kicked heels over head. At odd times during the day, when this joy forever
happened to have nothing particular on hand, she put in the time by
climbing up on places, and falling down off them, uniformly damaging her
self in the operation. As young as she is, she speaks many words tolerably
distinctly; and being plain-spoken in other respects, blunt and to the point,
she opens conversation with all strangers, male or female, with the same
formula, “How do, Jim?”
Not being familiar with the ways of children, it is possible that I have
been magnifying into matter of surprise things which may not strike any
one who is familiar with infancy as being at all astonishing. However, I
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 all babies are things
of beauty and joys forever.

“ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.—“I am an
enthusiastic student of mathematics, and it is so vexatious to
me to find my progress constantly impeded by these
mysterious arithmetical technicalities. Now do tell me what
the difference is between geometry and conchology?”

Here you come again with your arithmetical 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 center 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 unintellectual clam as you. Now compare
conchology and geometry together, and you will see what the difference is,
and your question will be answered. But don’t torture me with any more
arithmetical horrors until you know I am rid of my cold. I feel the bitterest
animosity toward 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.

TO RAISE POULTRY

[Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a
complimentary membership upon the author. Written about
1870.]

Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the subject
of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready sympathy in my
breast. Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study with me, and I may
say without egotism that as early as the age of seventeen I was acquainted
with all the best and speediest methods of raising chickens, from raising
them off a roost by burning lucifer matches under their noses, down to
lifting them off a fence on a frosty night by insinuating the end of a warm

board under their heels. By the time I was twenty years old, I really suppose
I had raised more poultry than any one individual in all the section round
about there. The very chickens came to know my talent by and by. The
youth of both sexes ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that
came to crow, “remained to pray,” when I passed by.
I have had so much experience in the raising of 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 always 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 henroost (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 bag with you or leaving it behind, according
as circumstances shall dictate. N. B.—I have seen the time when it was
eligible and appropriate to leave the sack behind and walk off with
considerable 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 is a frosty night, understand. Arrived at the tree, or
fence, or other henroost (your own if you are an idiot), you warm the end of
your plank in your friend’s fire vessel, and then raise it aloft and ease it up
gently against a slumbering chicken’s foot. If the subject of your attentions
is a true bird, he will infallibly return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and
step out and take up quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously
accessory before the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question
in our minds as it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not
really and deliberately committing suicide in the second degree. [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 to a dollar and a half
apiece, 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 promiscuously, but put them
in a coop as strong as a fireproof safe and keep it in the kitchen at night.
The method I speak of is not always a bright and satisfying success, and yet
there are so many little articles of vertu about a kitchen, that if you fail on
the coop you can generally bring away something else. I brought away a
nice steel trap one night, worth ninety cents.

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.

EXPERIENCE OF THE McWILLIAMSES
WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP
[As related to the author of this book by Mr. McWilliams, a
pleasant New York gentleman whom the said author met by
chance on a journey.]

Well, to go back to where I was before I digressed to explain to you how
that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup,[Diphtheria D.W.]

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 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 all say
that the turpentine in pine wood is good for weak back and the kidneys.”
“Ah—I was under a misapprehension. I did not know that the child’s
kidneys and spine were affected, and that the family physician had
recommended—”
“Who said the child’s spine and kidneys were affected?”
“My love, you intimated it.”
“The idea! I never intimated anything of the kind.”
“Why, my dear, it hasn’t been two minutes since you said—”
“Bother what I said! I don’t care what I did say. There isn’t any harm in
the child’s chewing a bit of pine stick if she wants to, and you know it
perfectly well. And she shall chew it, too. So there, now!”
“Say no more, my dear. I now see the force of your reasoning, and I will
go and order two or three cords of the best pine wood to-day. No child of
mine shall want while I—”
“Oh, please go along to your office and let me have some peace. A body
can never make the simplest remark but you must take it up and go to
arguing and arguing and arguing till you don’t know what you are talking
about, and you never do.”
“Very well, it shall be as you say. But there is a want of logic in your last
remark which—”

However, she was gone with a flourish before I could finish, and had
taken the child with her. That night at dinner she confronted me with a face
as white as a sheet:
“Oh, Mortimer, there’s another! Little Georgi Gordon is taken.”
“Membranous croup?”
“Membranous croup.”
“Is there any hope for him?”
“None in the wide world. Oh, what is to become of us!”
By and by a nurse brought in our Penelope to say good night and offer
the customary prayer at the mother’s knee. In the midst of “Now I lay me
down to sleep,” she gave a slight cough! My wife fell back like one stricken
with death. But the next moment she was up and brimming with the
activities which terror inspires.
She commanded that the child’s crib be removed from the nursery to our
bedroom; and she went along to see the order executed. She took me with
her, of course. We got matters arranged with speed. A cot-bed was put up in
my wife’s dressing room for the nurse. But now Mrs. McWilliams said we
were too far away from the other baby, and what if he were to have the
symptoms in the night—and she blanched again, poor thing.

We then restored the crib and the nurse to the nursery and put up a bed
for ourselves in a room adjoining.
Presently, however, Mrs. McWilliams said suppose the baby should catch
it from Penelope? This thought struck a new panic to her heart, and the tribe
of us could not get the crib out of the nursery again fast enough to satisfy
my wife, though she assisted in her 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 returned, bag and baggage, to our own bedroom once more, and
felt a great gladness, like storm-buffeted birds that have found their nest
again.
Mrs. McWilliams sped to the nursery to see how things were going on
there. She was back in a moment with a new dread. She said:
“What can make Baby sleep so?”

I said:
“Why, my darling, Baby always sleeps like a graven image.”
“I know. I know; but there’s something peculiar about his sleep now. He
seems to—to—he seems to breathe so regularly. Oh, 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, anyhow, 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 foreordained. He never was sick before.
Never. We have not been living as we ought to live, Mortimer. Time and
time again I have told you so. Now you see the result. Our child will never
get well. Be thankful if you can forgive yourself; I never can forgive
myself.”
I said, without intent to hurt, but with heedless choice of words, that I
could not see that we had been living such an abandoned life.
“Mortimer! Do you want to bring the judgment upon Baby, too!”
Then she began to cry, but suddenly exclaimed:
“The doctor must have sent medicines!”
I said:

“Certainly. They are here. I was only waiting for you to give me a
chance.”
“Well do give them to me! Don’t you know that every moment is
precious now? But what was the use in sending medicines, when he knows
that the disease is incurable?”
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 perishing
thing a tablespoonful, and try to be quick!”
“Why, my dear, a tablespoonful 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! Mortimer, a tablespoonful 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.”
“I thought as much. Please turn it on at once. This room is cold.”
I turned it on, and presently fell asleep again. I was aroused once more:
“Dearie, would you mind moving the crib to your side of the bed? It is
nearer the register.”
I moved it, but had a collision with the rug and woke up the child. I
dozed off once more, while my wife quieted the sufferer. But in a little
while these words came murmuring remotely through the fog of my
drowsiness:
“Mortimer, if we only had some goose grease—will you ring?”

I climbed dreamily out, and stepped on a cat, which responded with a
protest and would have got a 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—”
“Now I am not going to suppose anything about the cat. It never would
have occurred if Maria had been allowed to remain here and attend to these
duties, which are in her line and are not in mine.”

“Now, Mortimer, I should think you would be ashamed to make a remark
like that. It is a pity if you cannot do the few little things I ask of you at
such an awful time as this when our child—”
“There, there, I will do anything you want. But I can’t raise anybody with
this bell. They’re all gone to bed. Where is the goose grease?”
“On the mantelpiece in the nursery. If you’ll step there and speak to
Maria—”
I fetched the goose grease and went to sleep again. Once more I was
called:
“Mortimer, I so hate to disturb you, but the room is still too cold for me
to try to apply this stuff. Would you mind lighting the fire? It is all ready to
touch a match to.”
I dragged myself out and lit the fire, and then sat down disconsolate.
“Mortimer, don’t sit there and catch your death of cold. Come to bed.”
As I was stepping in she said:
“But wait a moment. Please give the child some more of the medicine.”
Which I did. It was a medicine which made a child more or less lively; so
my wife made use of its waking interval to strip it and grease it all over
with the goose oil. I was soon asleep once more, but once more I had to get
up.
“Mortimer, I feel a draft. I feel it distinctly. There is nothing so bad for
this disease as a draft. Please move the crib in front of the fire.”
I did it; and collided with the rug again, which I threw in the fire. Mrs.
McWilliams sprang out of bed and rescued it and we had some words. I had
another trifling interval of sleep, and then got up, by request, and
constructed a flax-seed poultice. This was placed upon the child’s breast
and left there to do its healing work.
A wood-fire is not a permanent thing. I got up every twenty minutes and
renewed ours, and this gave Mrs. McWilliams the opportunity to shorten
the times of giving the medicines by ten minutes, which was a great
satisfaction to her. Now and then, between times, I reorganized the flax-
seed poultices, and applied sinapisms and other sorts of blisters where
unoccupied places could be found upon the child. Well, toward morning the

wood gave out and my wife wanted me to go down cellar and get some
more. I said:

“My dear, it is a laborious job, and the child must be nearly warm
enough, with her extra clothing. Now mightn’t we put on another layer of
poultices and—”
I did not finish, because I was interrupted. 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:

“It is all over! All over! The child’s perspiring! What shall we do?”
“Mercy, how you terrify me! I don’t know what we ought to do. Maybe if
we scraped her and put her in the draft again—”
“Oh, 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 little slivers in
her throat. They won’t do her any hurt.”
“No,” said I, “I can well believe that. Indeed, the turpentine that is in
them is 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

[written about 1865]

I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen—an unusually smart child,
I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling,
and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine 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 Hannibal 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 not 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 jackknife—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 about such
a publication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other
worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting
matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of
gratuitous rascality and “see him squirm.”
I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the “Burial of Sir
John Moore”—and a pretty crude parody it was, too.
Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously—not because
they had done anything to deserve, but merely because I thought it was my
duty to make the paper lively.
Next I gently touched up the newest stranger—the lion of the day, the
gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb of
the first water, and the “loudest” dressed man in the state. He was an
inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy “poetry” for the
journal, about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed,
“To MARY IN H—l,” meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But while
setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I
regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I compressed it into a
snappy footnote at the bottom—thus: “We will let this thing pass, just this
once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly that we
have a character to sustain, and 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-barreled shotgun 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 war-whoop 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
bumper of “Fahnestock’s Vermifuge.” 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!

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK

[written about 1869]

It is seldom pleasant to tell on oneself, but some times it is a sort of relief
to a man to make a confession. I wish to unburden my mind now, and yet I
almost believe that I am moved to do it more because I long to bring
censure upon another man than because I desire to pour balm upon my

wounded heart. (I don’t know what balm is, but I believe it is the correct
expression to use in this connection—never having seen any balm.) You
may remember that I lectured in Newark lately for the young 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 once more! Oh, if I could only
see him weep!” I was touched. I could never withstand distress.
I said: “Bring him to my lecture. I’ll start him for you.”
“Oh, if you could but do it! If you could but do it, all our family would
bless you for evermore—for he is so very dear to us. Oh, my benefactor,
can you make him laugh? can you bring soothing tears to those parched
orbs?”
I was profoundly moved. I said: “My son, bring the old party round. I
have got some jokes in that lecture that will make him laugh if there is any
laugh in him; and if they miss fire, I have got some others that will make
him cry or kill him, one or the other.” Then the young man blessed me, and
wept on my neck, and went after his uncle. He placed him in full view, in
the second row of benches, that night, and I began on him. I tried him with
mild jokes, then with severe ones; I dosed him with bad jokes and riddled
him with good ones; I fired old stale jokes into him, and peppered him fore
and aft with red-hot new ones; I warmed up to my work, and assaulted him
on the right and left, in front and behind; I fumed and sweated and charged
and ranted till I was hoarse and sick and frantic and furious; but I never
moved him once—I never started a smile or a tear! Never a ghost of a
smile, and never a suspicion of moisture! I was astounded. I closed the
lecture at last with one despairing shriek—with one wild burst of humor,
and hurled a joke of supernatural atrocity full at him!
Then I sat down bewildered and exhausted.
The president of the society came up and bathed my head with cold
water, and said: “What made you carry on so toward 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?

THE OFFICE BORE

[written about 1869]

He arrives just as regularly as the clock strikes nine in the morning. And
so he even beats the editor sometimes, and the porter must leave his work
and climb two or three pairs of stairs to unlock the “Sanctum” door and let
him in. He lights one of the office pipes—not reflecting, perhaps, that the

editor may be one of those “stuck-up” people who would as soon have a
stranger defile his tooth-brush as his pipe-stem. Then he begins to loll—for
a person who can consent to loaf his useless life away in ignominious
indolence has not the energy to sit up straight. He stretches full length on
the sofa awhile; then draws up to half length; then gets into a chair, hangs
his head back and his arms abroad, and stretches his legs till the rims of his
boot-heels rest upon the floor; by and by sits up and leans forward, with one
leg or both over the arm of the chair. But it is still 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 contentment.
At rare and long intervals, however, he sighs a sigh that is the eloquent
expression of a secret confession, to wit “I am useless and a nuisance, a
cumberer of the earth.” The bore and his comrades—for there are usually
from two to four on hand, day and night—mix into the conversation when
men come in to see the editors for a moment on business; they hold noisy
talks among themselves about politics in particular, and all other subjects in
general—even warming up, after a fashion, sometimes, and seeming to take
almost a real interest in what they are discussing. They ruthlessly call an
editor from his work with such a remark as: “Did you see this, Smith, in the
Gazette?” and proceed to read the paragraph while the sufferer reins in his
impatient pen and listens; they often loll and sprawl round the office hour
after hour, swapping anecdotes and relating personal experiences to each
other—hairbreadth escapes, social encounters with distinguished men,
election reminiscences, sketches of odd characters, etc. And through all
those hours they never seem to comprehend that they are robbing the
editors of their time, and the public of journalistic excellence in next day’s
paper. At other times they drowse, or dreamily pore over exchanges, or
droop limp and pensive over the chair-arms for an hour. Even this solemn
silence is small respite to the editor, for the next uncomfortable thing to
having people look over his shoulders, perhaps, is to have them sit 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 nitroglycerin would be likely to move
the bores out of listening-distance. To have to sit and endure the presence of
a bore day after day; to feel your cheerful spirits begin to sink as his

footstep sounds on the stair, and utterly vanish away as his tiresome form
enters the door; to suffer through his anecdotes and die slowly to his
reminiscences; 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 affliction that transcends any other that
men suffer. Physical pain is pastime to it, and hanging a pleasure excursion.

JOHNNY GREER

“The church was densely crowded that lovely summer Sabbath,” said the
Sunday-school superintendent, “and all, as their eyes rested upon the small
coffin, seemed impressed by the poor black boy’s fate. Above the stillness
the pastor’s voice rose, and chained the interest of every ear as he told, with
many an envied compliment, how that the brave, noble, daring little Johnny
Greer, when he saw the drowned body sweeping down toward the deep part
of the river whence the agonized parents never could have recovered it in
this world, gallantly sprang into the stream, and, at the risk of his life,
towed the corpse to shore, and held it fast till help came and secured it.
Johnny Greer was sitting just in front of me. A ragged street-boy, with eager
eye, turned upon him instantly, and said in a hoarse whisper
“‘No; but did you, though?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Towed the carkiss ashore and saved it yo’self?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Cracky! What did they give you?’
“‘Nothing.’
“‘W-h-a-t [with intense disgust]! D’you know what I’d ‘a’ done? I’d ‘a’
anchored him out in the stream, and said, Five dollars, gents, or you carn’t
have yo’ nigger.’”

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT
BEEF CONTRACT

[written about 1867]

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,
deceased, contracted with the General Government, on or about the 10th
day of October, 1861, to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of thirty
barrels of beef.
Very well.
He started after Sherman with the beef, but when he got to Washington
Sherman had gone to Manassas; so he took the beef and followed him there,
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 he took a fresh start and followed him clear
through his march to the sea. He arrived too late again by a few days; but
hearing that Sherman was going out in the Quaker City excursion to the
Holy Land, he took shipping for Beirut, calculating to head off the other
vessel. When he arrived in Jerusalem with his beef, he learned that Sherman
had not sailed in the Quaker City, but had gone to the Plains to fight the
Indians. He returned to America and started for the Rocky Mountains. After
sixty-eight days of arduous travel on the Plains, and when he had got within
four miles of Sherman’s headquarters, he was tomahawked and scalped, and
the Indians got the beef.

They got all of it but one barrel. Sherman’s army captured that, and so,
even in death, the bold navigator partly fulfilled his contract. In his will,
which he had kept like a journal, he bequeathed the contract to his son
Bartholomew. Bartholomew W. made out the following bill, and then died:

THE UNITED STATES

In account with JOHN WILSON MACKENZIE, of New Jersey,
deceased, Dr.

To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100, $3,000
To traveling expenses and transportation 14,000

Total $17,000

Rec’d Pay’t.
He died then; but he left the contract to Wm. J. Martin, who tried to
collect it, but died before he got through. He left it to Barker J. Allen, and
he tried 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 Leveler, came all unsummoned,
and foreclosed on him also. He left the bill to a relative of his in
Connecticut, Vengeance Hopkins 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—I am willing to go.” And so he was, poor
soul. Seven people inherited the contract after that; but they all died. So it
came into my hands at last. It fell to me through a relative by the name of
Hubbard—Bethlehem Hubbard, of Indiana. He had had a grudge against me
for a long time; but in his last moments he sent for me, and forgave me
everything, and, weeping, gave me the beef contract.
This ends the history of it up to the time that I succeeded to the property.
I will now endeavor to set myself straight before the nation in everything
that concerns my share in the matter. I took this beef contract, and the bill
for mileage and transportation, to the President of the United States.

He said, “Well, sir, what can I do for you?”
I said, “Sire, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861, John Wilson
Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased,
contracted with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman, the
sum total of thirty barrels of beef—”
He stopped me there, and dismissed me from his presence—kindly, but
firmly. The next day I called on the Secretary of State.
He said, “Well, sir?”
I said, “Your Royal Highness: on or about the 10th 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.”

I 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 10th day of October, 1861,
John Wilson Mackenzie of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey,
deceased, contracted with the General Government 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 government. It looked 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 Department; I waylaid the Speaker of the House of
Representatives. They had nothing to do with army contracts for beef. I
moved upon the Commissioner of the Patent Office.
I said, “Your August Excellency, on or about—”
“Perdition! have you got here with your incendiary beef contract, at last?
We have nothing to do with beef contracts for the army, my dear sir.”
“Oh, that is all very well—but somebody has got to pay for that beef. It
has got to be paid now, too, or I’ll confiscate this old Patent Office and
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 in a fight. The Patent Office won. But I
found out something to my advantage. I was told that the Treasury

Department was the proper place for me to go to. I went there. I waited two
hours and a half, and then I was admitted to the First Lord of the Treasury.
I said, “Most noble, grave, and reverend Signor, on or about the 10th day
of October, 1861, John Wilson Macken—”
“That is sufficient, sir. I have heard of you. Go to the First Auditor of the
Treasury.”
I did so. He sent me to the Second Auditor. The Second Auditor sent me
to the Third, and the Third sent me to the First Comptroller of the Corn-
Beef Division. This began to look like business. He examined his books and
all his loose papers, but found no minute of the beef contract. I went to the
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 Contracts 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 the newspapers looked
at me rather hard, but went on reading, and nobody said anything. However,
I had been used to this kind of alacrity from Fourth Assistant Junior Clerks
all through my eventful career, from the very day 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 I said to one
of the clerks who was reading:
“Illustrious Vagrant, where is the Grand Turk?”
“What do you mean, sir? whom do you mean? If you mean the Chief of
the Bureau, he is out.”
“Will he visit the harem to-day?”

The young man glared upon me awhile, and then went on reading his
paper. But I knew the ways of those clerks. I knew I was safe if he got
through before another New York mail arrived. He only had two more
papers left. After a while 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 Northwest Passage, as I regarded it—he found the long
lost record of that beef contract—he found the rock upon which so many of
my ancestors had split before they ever got to it. I was deeply moved. And
yet I rejoiced—for I had survived. I said with emotion, “Give it me. The
government will settle now.” He waved me back, and said there was
something yet to be done first.
“Where is this John Wilson Mackenzie?” said he.
“Dead.”
“When did he die?”
“He didn’t die at all—he was killed.”
“How?”
“Tomahawked.”
“Who tomahawked him?”
“Why, an Indian, of course. You didn’t suppose it was the superintendent
of a Sunday-school, did you?”
“No. An Indian, was it?”
“The same.”
“Name of the Indian?”
“His name? I don’t know his name.”
“Must have his name. Who saw the tomahawking done?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were not present yourself, then?”
“Which you can see by my hair. I was absent.
“Then how do you know that Mackenzie is dead?”

“Because he certainly died at that time, and I have every reason to
believe that he has been dead ever since. I know he has, in fact.”
“We must have proofs. Have you got the Indian?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, you must get him. Have you got the tomahawk?”
“I never thought of such a thing.”
“You must get the tomahawk. You must produce the Indian and the
tomahawk. If Mackenzie’s death can be proven by these, you can then go
before the commission appointed to audit claims with some show of getting
your bill under such headway that your children may possibly live to
receive the money and enjoy it. But that man’s death must be proven.
However, I may as well tell you that the government 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 that 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?”
“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 all I know about the great beef contract that has created so much
talk in the community. The clerk to whom I bequeathed it died. I know
nothing further about the contract, or any one 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

—[Some years ago, about 1867, when this was first
published, few people believed it, but considered it a mere
extravaganza. In these latter days it seems hard to realize
that there was ever a time when the robbing of our
government was a novelty. The very man who showed me
where to find the documents for this case was at that very
time spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in

Washington for a mail steamship concern, in the effort to
procure a subsidy for the company—a fact which was a long
time in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and
underwent Congressional investigation.]

This is history. It is not a wild extravaganza, like “John Wilson
Mackenzie’s Great Beef Contract,” but is a plain statement 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
unrelenting swindle upon the government and people of the United States—
for 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 Indians destroyed the
property, there was no relief for Fisher; but if the troops destroyed it, the
Government of the United States was debtor to Fisher for the amount
involved.
George Fisher must have considered that the Indians destroyed the
property, because, although he lived several years afterward, he does not
appear to have ever made any claim upon the government.
In the course of time Fisher died, and his widow married again. And by
and by, nearly twenty years after that dimly remembered raid upon Fisher’s
corn-fields, the widow Fisher’s new husband petitioned Congress for pay
for the property, and backed up the petition with many depositions and
affidavits which purported to prove that the troops, and not the Indians,
destroyed the property; that the troops, for some inscrutable reason,
deliberately burned down “houses” (or cabins) valued at $600, the same
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 fields were destroyed. The new generation of Fisher heirs then came
forward and put in a bill for damages. The Second Auditor awarded them
$8,873, being half the damage sustained by Fisher. The Auditor said the
testimony showed that at least half the destruction was done by the Indians
“before the troops started in pursuit,” and of course the 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 interest from the date of the first petition (1832) to the date when
the bill of damages was awarded. This sent the Fishers home happy with
sixteen years’ interest on $8,873—the same amounting to $8,997.94. Total,
$17,870.94.
3. For an entire year the suffering Fisher family remained quiet—even
satisfied, after a fashion. Then they swooped down upon the government
with their 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 corn-field
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.
They 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 had been paid too much already.
5. Therefore another interval of rest and silence ensued—an interval
which lasted four years—viz till 1858. The “right man in the right place”
was then Secretary of War—John B. Floyd, of peculiar renown! Here was a
master intellect; here was the very man to succor the suffering heirs of dead
and forgotten Fisher. They came up from Florida with a rush—a great tidal
wave of Fishers freighted with the same old musty documents about the
same immortal corn-fields of their ancestor. They straight-way got an act
passed transferring the Fisher matter from the dull Auditor to the ingenious
Floyd. What did Floyd do? He said, “IT WAS PROVED that the Indians
destroyed everything they could before the troops entered in pursuit.” He
considered, therefore, that what they destroyed must have consisted of “the
houses with all their contents, and the liquor” (the most trifling part of the
destruction, and set down at only $3,200 all told), and that the government
troops then drove them off and calmly proceeded to destroy:—
Two hundred and twenty acres of corn in the field, thirty-five acres of
wheat, and nine hundred and eighty-six head of live stock! [What a
singularly 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
$3,200 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, 3,000
Cattle, 5,000
Stock hogs, 1,050
Drove hogs, 1,204
Wheat, 350
Hides, 4,000
Corn on the Alabama River, 3,500

Total, 18,104
That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the “full value of the property
destroyed by the troops.”
He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, TOGETHER WITH
INTEREST FROM 1813. From this new sum total the amounts already paid
to the Fishers were deducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction
under forty thousand dollars) was handed to them and again they retired to
Florida in a condition of temporary tranquillity. Their ancestor’s farm had
now yielded them altogether nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash.
6. Does the reader suppose that that was the end of it? Does he suppose
those diffident Fishers were satisfied? Let the evidence show. The Fishers
were quiet just two years. Then they came swarming up out of the fertile
swamps of Florida with their same old documents, and besieged Congress
once more. Congress capitulated on the 1st 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 apparently a glaring and recent forgery in the papers; whereby a
witness’s testimony as to the price of corn in Florida in 1813 was made to
name double the amount which that witness had originally specified as the
price! The clerk not only called his superior’s attention to this thing, but in
making up his brief of the case called particular attention to it in writing.
That part of the brief never got before Congress, nor has Congress ever yet
had a hint of 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 ignores the Indians
altogether—puts no particle of the destruction of the Fisher property upon
them, but, even repenting him of charging them with burning the cabins and
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 absolutely treble the loss of corn on the
“Alabama River.” This new and ably conceived and executed bill of Mr.
Floyd’s figures up as follows (I copy again from the printed United States
Senate document):

The United States in account with the
legal representatives of George Fisher, deceased.

1813— DOL
To 550 head of cattle, at 10 dollars, 5,500
To 86 head of drove hogs, 1,204
To 350 head of stock hogs, 1,750
To 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT’S CREEK, 6,000
To 8 barrels of whisky, 350
To 2 barrels of brandy, 280
To 1 barrel of rum, 70
To dry-goods and merchandise in store, 1,100
To 35 acres of wheat, 350
To 2,000 hides, 4,000
To furs and hats in store, 600
To crockery ware in store, 100
To smith’s and carpenter’s tools, 250
To houses burned and destroyed, 600
To 4 dozen bottles of wine, 48

1814—
To 120 acres of corn on Alabama River, 9,500
To crops of peas, fodder, etc 3,250

Total, 34,952

To interest on $22,202, from July 1813
to November 1860, 47 years and 4 months, 63,053.68

To interest on $12,750, from September
1814 to November 1860, 46 years and 2 months, 35,317.50

Total, 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 in the sum of sixty-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,
1860, 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.
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, 2d Session; and for S. Ex. Doc. No. 106, 41st
Congress, 2d Session, and satisfy himself. The whole case is set forth in the
first volume of the Court of Claims Reports.
It is my belief that as long as the continent of America holds together, the
heirs of George Fisher, deceased, will still make pilgrimages to Washington
from the swamps of Florida, to plead for just a little more cash on their bill
of damages (even when they received the last of that sixty-seven thousand
dollars, they said it was only one fourth what the 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 persecuted Treasury of the
United States.

DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY

In 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 Chinaman? Before we side against him, along with outraged San
Francisco, let us give him a chance—let us hear the testimony for the
defense.
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
California imposes an unlawful mining-tax upon John the foreigner, and
allows Patrick 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 immigration into the mines, it is a thing that is much applauded,
and likewise regarded as being singularly facetious.
It was in this way that he found out that when a white man robs a sluice-
box (by the term white man is meant Spaniards, Mexicans, Portuguese,
Irish, Hondurans, Peruvians, Chileans, etc., etc.), 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 Chinaman 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 inscrutable 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 hurrahed into something enormous in order to keep the public from
noticing how many really important rascals went uncaptured in the mean
time, 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 every Chinaman, upon landing, must be vaccinated upon the wharf, and
pay to the state’s appointed officer ten dollars for the service, when there
are plenty of doctors in San Francisco who would be glad enough to do it
for him for fifty cents.
It was in this way that the boy found out that a Chinaman had no rights
that any man was bound to respect; that he had no sorrows that any man

was bound to pity; that neither his life nor his liberty was worth the
purchase of a penny when a white man needed a scapegoat; that nobody
loved Chinamen, 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 could have been more natural than for this sunny-
hearted-boy, tripping along to Sunday-school, with his mind teeming with
freshly learned incentives to high and virtuous action, to say to himself:
“Ah, there goes a Chinaman! God will not love me if I do not stone him.”
And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail.
Everything conspired to teach him that it was a high and holy thing to
stone a Chinaman, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty than 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 unoffending Chinamen, and make them flee for their lives.
—[I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at
present of one particular one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their
dogs on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on
his head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the
hilarity of the 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 publish it
because it might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the
paper.]
Keeping in mind the tuition in the humanities which the entire “Pacific
coast” gives its youth, there is a very sublimity of incongruity in the
virtuous flourish with which the good city fathers of San Francisco
proclaim (as they have lately done) that “The police are positively ordered
to arrest all boys, of every description and wherever found, who engage in
assaulting Chinamen.”
Still, let us be truly glad they have made the order, notwithstanding its
inconsistency; and let us rest perfectly confident the police are glad, too.
Because there is no personal peril in arresting boys, provided they be of the

small kind, and the reporters will have to laud their performances just as
loyally as ever, or go without items.
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
arresting Master Tommy Jones, after a determined resistance,” etc., etc.,
followed by the customary statistics and final hurrah, with its unconscious
sarcasm: “We are happy in being able to state that this is the forty-seventh
boy arrested by this gallant officer since the new ordinance went into effect.
The most extraordinary activity prevails in the police department. Nothing
like it has been seen since we can remember.”

THE JUDGE’S “SPIRITED WOMAN”

“I was sitting here,” said the judge, “in this old pulpit, holding court, and
we were trying a big, wicked-looking Spanish desperado for killing the
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 might, 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 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 wildcat, and out with a ‘navy’ and shot him dead in open
court!”
“That was spirited, I am willing to admit.”
“Wasn’t it, though?” said the judge admiringly.
“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I adjourned court right on the
spot, and we put on our coats and went out and took up a collection for her
and her cubs, and sent them over the mountains to their friends. Ah, she was
a spirited wench!”

INFORMATION WANTED

"WASHINGTON, December 10, 1867.
“Could you give me any information 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 attache of

the State Department, who was sent down with money to pay for the island.
My uncle had his money in the same box, and so when they went ashore,
getting a receipt, the sailors broke open the box and took all the money, not
making any distinction 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
Gibraltar, 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 Gibraltar.
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 out a 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.

He 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 to do. 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 he came 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 thinking about buying Porto Rico. If that is true,
he wishes to try Porto Rico, if it is a quiet place. How is Porto Rico for his
style of man? Do you think the government will buy it?

SOME LEARNED FABLES,
FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS
IN THREE PARTS

PART FIRST

HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD SENT OUT A
SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION

Once the creatures of the forest held a great 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 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 had once
sent Dr. Bull Frog, with a picked crew, to hunt for a northwesterly 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 government sent Sir Grass Hopper to hunt for the sources of the rill
that emptied into the swamp; and afterward 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
showed 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 savants, 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 ironclads—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. A vast level plain stretched before them, watered by a

sinuous stream; and beyond there towered up against the sky a long and
lofty barrier of some kind, they did not know what. The Tumble-Bug said
he believed it was simply land tilted up on its edge, because he knew he
could see trees on it. But Professor Snail and the others said:
“You are hired to dig, sir—that is all. We need your muscle, not your
brains. When we want your opinion on scientific matters, we will hasten to
let you know. Your coolness is intolerable, too—loafing about here
meddling with august matters of learning, when the other laborers are
pitching camp. Go along and help handle the baggage.”
The Tumble-Bug turned on his heel uncrushed, unabashed, observing to
himself, “If it isn’t land tilted up, let me die the death of the unrighteous.”
Professor Bull Frog (nephew of the late explorer) said he believed the
ridge was the wall that inclosed the earth. He continued:
“Our fathers have left us much learning, but they had not traveled far, and
so we may count this a noble new discovery. We are safe for renown now,
even though our labors began and ended with this single achievement. I
wonder what this wall is built of? Can it be fungus? Fungus is an honorable
good thing to build a wall of.”
Professor Snail adjusted his field-glass and examined the rampart
critically. Finally he said:
“‘The fact that it is not diaphanous convinces me that it is a dense vapor
formed by the calorification of ascending moisture dephlogisticated by
refraction. A few endiometrical experiments would confirm this, but it is not
necessary. The thing is obvious.”
So he shut up his glass and went into his shell to make a note of the
discovery of the world’s end, and the nature of it.
“Profound mind!” said Professor Angle-Worm to Professor Field-Mouse;
“profound mind! nothing can long remain a mystery to that august brain.”
Night drew on apace, the sentinel crickets were posted, the Glow-Worm
and Fire-Fly lamps were lighted, and the camp sank to silence and sleep.
After breakfast in the morning, the expedition moved on. About noon a
great avenue was reached, which had in it two endless parallel bars of some
kind of hard black substance, raised the height of the tallest Bull Frog above
the general level. The scientists climbed up on these and examined and
tested them in various ways. They walked along them for a great distance,

but found no end and no break in them. They could arrive at no decision.
There was nothing in the records of science that mentioned anything of this
kind. But at last the bald and venerable geographer, Professor Mud Turtle, a
person who, born poor, and of a drudging low family, had, by his own
native force raised himself to the headship of the geographers of his
generation, said:
“‘My friends, we have indeed made a discovery here. We have found in a
palpable, compact, and imperishable state what the wisest of our fathers
always regarded as a mere thing of the imagination. Humble yourselves, my
friends, for we stand in a majestic presence. These are parallels of latitude!”
Every heart and every head was bowed, so awful, so sublime was the
magnitude of the discovery. Many shed tears.
The camp was pitched and the rest of the day given up to writing
voluminous accounts of the marvel, and correcting astronomical tables to fit
it. Toward midnight a demoniacal shriek was heard, then a clattering and
rumbling noise, and the next instant a vast terrific eye shot by, with a long
tail attached, and disappeared in the gloom, still uttering triumphant shrieks.

The poor camp laborers were stricken to the heart with fright, and
stampeded for the high grass in a body. But not the scientists. They had no
superstitions. They calmly proceeded to exchange theories. The ancient
geographer’s opinion was asked. He went into his shell and deliberated long
and profoundly. When he came out at last, they all knew by his worshiping
countenance that he brought light. Said he:
“Give thanks for this stupendous thing which we have been permitted to
witness. It is the Vernal Equinox!”
There were shoutings and great rejoicings.
“But,” said the Angle-Worm, uncoiling after reflection, “this is dead
summer-time.”
“Very well,” said the Turtle, “we are far from our region; the season
differs with the difference of time between the two points.”
“Ah, true. True enough. But it is night. How should the sun pass in the
night?”

“In these distant regions he doubtless passes always in the night at this
hour.”
“Yes, doubtless that is true. But it being night, how is it that we could see
him?”
“It is a great mystery. I grant that. But I am persuaded that the humidity
of the atmosphere in these remote regions is such that particles of daylight
adhere to the disk and it was by aid of these that we were enabled to see the
sun in the dark.”
This was deemed satisfactory, and due entry was made of the decision.
But about this moment those dreadful shriekings were heard again; again
the rumbling and thundering came speeding up out of the night; and once
more a flaming great eye flashed by and lost itself in gloom and distance.
The camp laborers gave themselves up for lost. The savants were sorely
perplexed. Here was a marvel hard to account for. They thought and they
talked, they talked and they thought. Finally the learned and aged Lord
Grand-Daddy-Longlegs, who had been sitting in deep study, with his
slender limbs crossed and his stemmy arms folded, said:
“Deliver your opinions, brethren, and then I will tell my thought—for I
think I have solved this problem.”
“So be it, good your lordship,” piped the weak treble of the wrinkled and
withered Professor Woodlouse, “for we shall hear from your lordship’s lips
naught but wisdom.” [Here the speaker threw in a mess of trite, threadbare,
exasperating quotations from the ancient poets and philosophers, delivering
them with unction in the sounding grandeurs of the original tongues, they
being from the Mastodon, the Dodo, and other dead languages.] “Perhaps I
ought not to presume to meddle with matters pertaining to astronomy at all,
in such a presence as this, I who have made it the business of my life to
delve only among the riches of the extinct languages and unearth the
opulence of their ancient lore; but still, as unacquainted as I am with the
noble science of astronomy, I beg with deference and humility to suggest
that inasmuch as the last of these wonderful apparitions proceeded in
exactly the opposite direction from that pursued by the first, which you
decide to be the Vernal Equinox, and greatly resembled it in all particulars,
is it not possible, nay certain, that this last is the Autumnal Equi—”

“O-o-o!” “O-o-o! go to bed! go to bed!” with annoyed derision from
everybody. So the poor old Woodlouse retreated out of sight, consumed
with shame.
Further discussion followed, and then the united voice of the commission
begged Lord Longlegs to speak. He said:
“Fellow-scientists, it is my belief that we have witnessed a thing which
has occurred in perfection but once before in the knowledge of created
beings. It is a phenomenon of inconceivable importance and interest, view it
as one may, but its interest to us is vastly heightened by an added
knowledge of its nature which no scholar has heretofore possessed or even
suspected. This great marvel which we have just witnessed, fellow-savants
(it almost takes my breath away), is nothing less than the transit of Venus!”
Every scholar sprang to his feet pale with astonishment. Then ensued
tears, handshakings, frenzied embraces, and the most extravagant
jubilations of every sort. But by and by, as emotion began to retire within
bounds, and reflection to return to the front, the accomplished Chief
Inspector Lizard observed:
“But how is this? Venus should traverse the sun’s surface, not the
earth’s.”
The arrow went home. It carried sorrow to the breast of every apostle of
learning there, for none could deny that this was a formidable criticism. But
tranquilly the venerable Duke crossed his limbs behind his ears and said:
“My friend has touched the marrow of our mighty discovery. Yes—all
that have lived before us thought a transit of Venus consisted of a flight
across the sun’s face; they thought it, they maintained it, they honestly
believed it, simple hearts, and were justified in it by the limitations of their
knowledge; but to us has been granted the inestimable boon of proving that
the transit occurs across the earth’s face, for we have SEEN it!”
The assembled wisdom sat in speechless adoration of this imperial
intellect. All doubts had instantly departed, like night before the lightning.
The Tumble-Bug had just intruded, unnoticed. He now came reeling
forward among the scholars, familiarly slapping first one and then another
on the shoulder, saying “Nice (’ic) nice old boy!” and smiling a smile of
elaborate content. Arrived at a good position for speaking, he put his left
arm akimbo with his knuckles planted in his hip just under the edge of his

cut-away coat, bent his right leg, placing his toe on the ground and resting
his heel with easy grace against his left shin, puffed out his aldermanic
stomach, opened his lips, leaned his right elbow on Inspector Lizard’s
shoulder, and—
But the shoulder was indignantly withdrawn and the hard-handed son of
toil went to earth. He floundered a bit, but came up smiling, arranged his
attitude with the same careful detail as before, only choosing Professor
Dogtick’s shoulder for a support, opened his lips and—
Went to earth again. He presently scrambled up once more, still smiling,
made a loose effort to brush the dust off his coat and legs, but a smart pass
of his hand missed entirely, and the force of the unchecked impulse slewed
him suddenly around, twisted his legs together, and projected him, limber
and sprawling, into the lap of the Lord Longlegs. Two or three scholars
sprang forward, flung the low creature head over heels into a corner, and
reinstated the patrician, smoothing his ruffled dignity with many soothing
and regretful speeches. Professor Bull Frog roared out:
“No more of this, sirrah Tumble-Bug! Say your say and then get you
about your business with speed! Quick—what is your errand? Come move
off a trifle; you smell like a stable; what have you been at?”
“Please (’ic!) please your worship I chanced to light upon a find. But no
m(e-uck!) matter ’bout that. There’s b(’ic !) been another find which—beg
pardon, your honors, what was that th(’ic!) thing that ripped by here first?”
“It was the Vernal Equinox.”
“Inf(’ic!)fernal equinox. ’At’s all right. D(’ic !) Dunno him. What’s other
one?”
“The transit of Venus.
“G(’ic !) Got me again. No matter. Las’ one dropped something.”
“Ah, indeed! Good luck! Good news! Quick what is it?”
“M(’ic!) Mosey out ’n’ see. It’ll pay.”
No more votes were taken for four-and-twenty hours. Then the following
entry was made:
“The commission went in a body to view the find. It was found to consist
of a hard, smooth, huge object with a rounded summit surmounted by a
short upright projection resembling a section of a cabbage stalk divided

transversely. This projection was not solid, but was a hollow cylinder
plugged with a soft woody substance unknown to our region—that is, it had
been so plugged, but unfortunately this obstruction had been heedlessly
removed by Norway Rat, Chief of the Sappers and Miners, before our
arrival. The vast object before us, so mysteriously conveyed from the
glittering domains of space, was found to be hollow and nearly filled with a
pungent liquid of a brownish hue, like rainwater that has stood for some
time. And such a spectacle as met our view!

Norway Rat was perched upon the summit engaged in thrusting his tail
into the cylindrical projection, drawing it out dripping, permitting the
struggling multitude of laborers to suck the end of it, then straightway

reinserting it and delivering the fluid to the mob as before. Evidently this
liquor had strangely potent qualities; for all that partook of it were
immediately exalted with great and pleasurable emotions, and went
staggering about singing ribald songs, embracing, fighting, dancing,
discharging irruptions of profanity, and defying all authority. Around us
struggled a massed and uncontrolled mob—uncontrolled and likewise
uncontrollable, for the whole army, down to the very sentinels, were mad
like the rest, by reason of the drink. We were seized upon by these reckless
creatures, and within the hour we, even we, were undistinguishable from
the rest—the demoralization was complete and universal. In time the camp
wore itself out with its orgies and sank into a stolid and pitiable stupor, in
whose mysterious bonds rank was forgotten and strange bedfellows made,
our eyes, at the resurrection, being blasted and our souls petrified with the
incredible spectacle of that intolerable stinking scavenger, the Tumble-Bug,
and the illustrious patrician my Lord Grand Daddy, Duke of Longlegs, lying
soundly steeped in sleep, and clasped lovingly in each other’s arms, the like
whereof hath not been seen in all the ages that tradition compasseth, and
doubtless none shall ever in this world find faith to master the belief of it
save only we that have beheld the damnable and unholy vision. Thus
inscrutable be the ways of God, whose will be done!
“This day, by order, did the engineer-in-chief, Herr Spider, rig the
necessary tackle for the overturning of the vast reservoir, and so its
calamitous contents were discharged in a torrent upon the thirsty earth,
which drank it up, and now there is no more danger, we reserving but a few
drops for experiment and scrutiny, and to exhibit to the king and
subsequently preserve among the wonders of the museum. What this liquid
is has been determined. It is without question that fierce and most
destructive fluid called lightning. It was wrested, in its container, from its
storehouse in the clouds, by the resistless might of the flying planet, and
hurled at our feet as she sped by. An interesting discovery here results.
Which is, that lightning, kept to itself, is quiescent; it is the assaulting
contact of the thunderbolt that releases it from captivity, ignites its awful
fires, and so produces an instantaneous combustion and explosion which
spread disaster and desolation far and wide in the earth.”
After another day devoted to rest and recovery, the expedition proceeded
upon its way. Some days later it went into camp in a pleasant part of the
plain, and the savants sallied forth to see what they might find. Their reward

was at hand. Professor Bull Frog discovered a strange tree, and called his
comrades. They inspected it with profound interest. It was very tall and
straight, and wholly devoid of bark, limbs, or foliage. By triangulation Lord
Longlegs determined its altitude; Herr Spider measured its circumference at
the base and computed the circumference at its top by a mathematical
demonstration based upon the warrant furnished by the uniform degree of
its taper upward. It was considered a very extraordinary find; and since it
was a tree of a hitherto unknown species, Professor Woodlouse gave it a
name of a learned sound, being none other than that of Professor Bull Frog
translated into the ancient Mastodon language, for it had always been the
custom with discoverers to perpetuate their names and honor themselves by
this sort of connection with their discoveries.

Now Professor Field-Mouse having placed his sensitive ear to the tree,
detected a rich, harmonious sound issuing from it. This surprising thing was
tested and enjoyed by each scholar in turn, and great was the gladness and
astonishment of all. Professor Woodlouse was requested to add to and
extend the tree’s name so as to make it suggest the musical quality it
possessed—which he did, furnishing the addition Anthem Singer, done into
the Mastodon tongue.
By this time Professor Snail was making some telescopic inspections. He
discovered a great number of these trees, extending in a single rank, with
wide intervals between, as far as his instrument would carry, both
southward and northward. He also presently discovered that all these trees
were bound together, near their tops, by fourteen great ropes, one above
another, which ropes were continuous, from tree to tree, as far as his vision
could reach. This was surprising. Chief Engineer Spider ran aloft and soon
reported that these ropes were simply a web hung there by some colossal
member of his own species, for he could see its prey dangling here and
there from the strands, in the shape of mighty shreds and rags that had a
woven look about their texture and were no doubt the discarded skins of
prodigious insects which had been caught and eaten. And then he ran along
one of the ropes to make a closer inspection, but felt a smart sudden burn on
the soles of his feet, accompanied by a paralyzing shock, wherefore he let
go and swung himself to the earth by a thread of his own spinning, and
advised all to hurry at once to camp, lest the monster should appear and get
as much interested in the savants as they were in him and his works. So
they departed with speed, making notes about the gigantic web as they
went. And that evening the naturalist of the expedition built a beautiful
model of the colossal spider, having no need to see it in order to do this,
because he had picked up a fragment of its vertebra by the tree, and so
knew exactly what the creature looked like and what its habits and its
preferences were by this simple evidence alone. He built it with a tail, teeth,
fourteen legs, and a snout, and said it ate grass, cattle, pebbles, and dirt with
equal enthusiasm. This animal was regarded as a very precious addition to
science. It was hoped a dead one might be found to stuff. Professor
Woodlouse thought that he and his brother scholars, by lying hid and being
quiet, might maybe catch a live one. He was advised to try it. Which was all
the attention that was paid to his suggestion. The conference ended with the
naming the monster after the naturalist, since he, after God, had created it.

“And improved it, mayhap,” muttered the Tumble-Bug, who was
intruding again, according to his idle custom and his unappeasable
curiosity.
END OF PART FIRST

SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND
GIRLS
PART SECOND
HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD COMPLETED
THEIR SCIENTIFIC LABORS

A week later the expedition camped in the midst of a collection of
wonderful curiosities. These were a sort of vast caverns of stone that rose
singly and in bunches out of the plain by the side of the river which they
had first seen when they emerged from the forest. These caverns stood in
long, straight rows on opposite sides of broad aisles that were bordered with
single ranks of trees. The summit of each cavern sloped sharply both ways.
Several horizontal rows of great square holes, obstructed by a thin, shiny,
transparent substance, pierced the frontage of each cavern. Inside were
caverns within caverns; and one might ascend and visit these minor
compartments by means of curious winding ways consisting of continuous
regular terraces raised one above another. There were many huge, shapeless
objects in each compartment which were considered to have been living
creatures at one time, though now the thin brown skin was shrunken and
loose, and rattled when disturbed. Spiders were here in great number, and
their cobwebs, stretched in all directions and wreathing the great skinny
dead together, were a pleasant spectacle, since they inspired with life and
wholesome cheer a scene which would otherwise have brought to the mind
only a sense of forsakenness and desolation. Information was sought of
these spiders, but in vain. They were of a different nationality from those
with the expedition, and their language seemed but a musical, meaningless
jargon. They were a timid, gentle race, but ignorant, and heathenish
worshipers of unknown gods. The expedition detailed a great detachment of

missionaries to teach them the true religion, and in a week’s time a precious
work had been wrought among those darkened creatures, not three families
being by that time at peace with each other or having a settled belief in any
system of religion whatever. This encouraged the expedition to establish a
colony of missionaries there permanently, that the work of grace might go
on.
But let us not outrun our narrative. After close examination of the fronts
of the caverns, and much thinking and exchanging of theories, the scientists
determined the nature of these singular formations. They said that each
belonged mainly to the Old Red Sandstone period; that the cavern fronts
rose in innumerable and wonderfully regular strata high in the air, each
stratum about five frog-spans thick, and that in the present discovery lay an
overpowering refutation of all received geology; for between every two
layers of Old Red Sandstone reposed a thin layer of decomposed limestone;
so instead of there having been but one Old Red Sandstone period there had
certainly been not less than a hundred and seventy-five! And by the same
token it was plain that there had also been a hundred and seventy-five
floodings of the earth and depositings of limestone strata! The unavoidable
deduction from which pair of facts was the overwhelming truth that the
world, instead of being only two hundred thousand years old, was older by
millions upon millions of years! And there was another curious thing: every
stratum of Old Red Sandstone was pierced and divided at mathematically
regular intervals by vertical strata of limestone. Up-shootings of igneous
rock through fractures in water formations were common; but here was the
first instance where water-formed rock had been so projected. It was a great
and noble discovery, and its value to science was considered to be
inestimable.
A critical examination of some of the lower strata demonstrated the
presence of fossil ants and tumble-bugs (the latter accompanied by their
peculiar goods), and with high gratification the fact was enrolled upon the
scientific record; for this was proof that these vulgar laborers belonged to
the first and lowest orders of created beings, though at the same time there
was something repulsive in the reflection that the perfect and exquisite
creature of the modern uppermost order owed its origin to such ignominious
beings through the mysterious law of Development of Species.

The Tumble-Bug, overhearing this discussion, said he was willing that
the parvenus of these new times should find what comfort they might in
their wise-drawn theories, since as far as he was concerned he was content
to be of the old first families and proud to point back to his place among the
old original aristocracy of the land.
“Enjoy your mushroom dignity, stinking of the varnish of yesterday’s
veneering, since you like it,” said he; “suffice it for the Tumble-Bugs that
they come of a race that rolled their fragrant spheres down the solemn aisles
of antiquity, and left their imperishable works embalmed in the Old Red
Sandstone to proclaim it to the wasting centuries as they file along the
highway of Time!”
“Oh, take a walk!” said the chief of the expedition, with derision.

The summer passed, and winter approached. In and about many of the
caverns were what seemed to be inscriptions. Most of the scientists said
they were inscriptions, a few said they were not. The chief philologist,
Professor Woodlouse, maintained that they were writings, done in a
character utterly unknown to scholars, and in a language equally unknown.
He had early ordered his artists and draftsmen to make facsimiles of all that
were discovered; and had set himself about finding the key to the hidden
tongue. In this work he had followed the method which had always been
used by decipherers previously. That is to say, he placed a number of copies
of inscriptions before him and studied them both collectively and in detail.
To begin with, he placed the following copies together:
THE AMERICAN HOTEL. MEALS AT ALL HOURS.
THE SHADES. NO SMOKING.
BOATS FOR HIRE CHEAP UNION PRAYER MEETING, 4 P.M.
BILLIARDS. THE WATERSIDE JOURNAL.
THE A1 BARBER SHOP. TELEGRAPH OFFICE.
KEEP OFF THE GRASS. TRY BRANDRETH’S PILLS.
COTTAGES FOR RENT DURING THE WATERING SEASON.
FOR SALE CHEAP. FOR SALE CHEAP.
FOR SALE CHEAP. FOR SALE CHEAP.
At first it seemed to the professor that this was a sign-language, and that
each word was represented by a distinct sign; further examination
convinced him that it was a written language, and that every letter of its
alphabet was represented by a character of its own; and finally he decided
that it was a language which conveyed itself partly by letters, and partly by
signs or hieroglyphics. This conclusion was forced upon him by the
discovery of several specimens of the following nature:

He observed that certain inscriptions were met with in greater frequency
than others. Such as “FOR SALE CHEAP”; “BILLIARDS”; “S. T.—1860
—X”; “KENO”; “ALE ON DRAUGHT.” Naturally, then, these must be
religious maxims. But this idea was cast aside by and by, as the mystery of
the strange alphabet began to clear itself. In time, the professor was enabled
to translate several of the inscriptions with considerable plausibility, though
not to the perfect satisfaction of all the scholars. Still, he made constant and
encouraging progress.
Finally a cavern was discovered with these inscriptions upon it:
WATERSIDE MUSEUM.
Open at All Hours.
Admission 50 cents.
WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF
WAX-WORKS, ANCIENT FOSSILS,
ETC.
Professor Woodlouse affirmed that the word “Museum” was equivalent
to the phrase “lumgath molo,” or “Burial Place.” Upon entering, the
scientists were well astonished. But what they saw may be best conveyed in
the language of their own official report:
“Erect, in a row, were a sort of rigid great figures which struck us
instantly as belonging to the long extinct species of reptile called MAN,
described in our ancient records. This was a peculiarly gratifying discovery,
because of late times it has become fashionable to regard this creature as a
myth and a superstition, a work of the inventive imaginations of our remote
ancestors. But here, indeed, was Man perfectly preserved, in a fossil state.
And this was his burial place, as already ascertained by the inscription. And

now it began to be suspected that the caverns we had been inspecting had
been his ancient haunts in that old time that he roamed the earth—for upon
the breast of each of these tall fossils was an inscription in the character
heretofore noticed. One read, ‘CAPTAIN KIDD THE PIRATE’; another,
‘QUEEN VICTORIA’; another, ‘ABE LINCOLN’; another, ‘GEORGE
WASHINGTON,’ etc.
“With feverish interest we called for our ancient scientific records to
discover if perchance the description of Man there set down would tally
with the fossils before us. Professor Woodlouse read it aloud in its quaint
and musty phraseology, to wit:
“‘In ye time of our fathers Man still walked ye earth, as by tradition we
know. It was a creature of exceeding great size, being compassed about with
a loose skin, sometimes of one color, sometimes of many, the which it was
able to cast at will; which being done, the hind legs were discovered to be
armed with short claws like to a mole’s but broader, and ye forelegs with
fingers of a curious slimness and a length much more prodigious than a
frog’s, armed also with broad talons for scratching in ye earth for its food. It
had a sort of feathers upon its head such as hath a rat, but longer, and a beak
suitable for seeking its food by ye smell thereof. When it was stirred with
happiness, it leaked water from its eyes; and when it suffered or was sad, it
manifested it with a horrible hellish cackling clamor that was exceeding
dreadful to hear and made one long that it might rend itself and perish, and
so end its troubles. Two Mans being together, they uttered noises at each
other like this: “Haw-haw-haw—dam good, dam good,” together with other
sounds of more or less likeness to these, wherefore ye poets conceived that
they talked, but poets be always ready to catch at any frantic folly, God he
knows. Sometimes this creature goeth about with a long stick ye which it
putteth to its face and bloweth fire and smoke through ye same with a
sudden and most damnable bruit and noise that doth fright its prey to death,
and so seizeth it in its talons and walketh away to its habitat, consumed with
a most fierce and devilish joy.’
“Now was the description set forth by our ancestors wonderfully
indorsed and confirmed by the fossils before us, as shall be seen. The
specimen marked ‘Captain Kidd’ was examined in detail. Upon its head and
part of its face was a sort of fur like that upon the tail of a horse. With great
labor its loose skin was removed, whereupon its body was discovered to be

of a polished white texture, thoroughly petrified. The straw it had eaten, so
many ages gone by, was still in its body, undigested—and even in its legs.

“Surrounding these fossils were objects that would mean nothing to the
ignorant, but to the eye of science they were a revelation. They laid bare the
secrets of dead ages. These musty Memorials told us when Man lived, and
what were his habits. For here, side by side with Man, were the evidences
that he had lived in the earliest ages of creation, the companion of the other
low orders of life that belonged to that forgotten time. Here was the fossil
nautilus that sailed the primeval seas; here was the skeleton of the
mastodon, the ichthyosaurus, the cave-bear, the prodigious elk. Here, also,
were the charred bones of some of these extinct animals and of the young of

Man’s own species, split lengthwise, showing that to his taste the marrow
was a toothsome luxury. It was plain that Man had robbed those bones of
their contents, since no toothmark of any beast was upon them albeit the
Tumble-Bug intruded the remark that ‘no beast could mark a bone with its
teeth, anyway.’ Here were proofs that Man had vague, groveling notions of
art; for this fact was conveyed by certain things marked with the
untranslatable words, ‘FLINT HATCHETS, KNIVES, ARROW-HEADS,
AND BONE ORNAMENTS OF PRIMEVAL MAN.’ Some of these
seemed to be rude weapons chipped out of flint, and in a secret place was
found some more in process of construction, with this untranslatable
legend, on a thin, flimsy material, lying by:

“‘Jones, if you don’t want to be discharged from the
Musseum, make the next primeaveal weppons more careful
—you couldn’t even fool one of these sleepy old syentific
grannys from the Coledge with the last ones. And mind you
the animles you carved on some of the Bone Ornaments is a
blame sight too good for any primeaveal man that was ever
fooled.—Varnum, Manager.’

“Back of the burial place was a mass of ashes, showing that Man always
had a feast at a funeral—else why the ashes in such a place; and showing,
also, that he believed in God and the immortality of the soul —else why
these solemn ceremonies?
“To, sum up. We believe that Man had a written language. We know that
he indeed existed at one time, and is not a myth; also, that he was the
companion of the cave-bear, the mastodon, and other extinct species; that he
cooked and ate them and likewise the young of his own kind; also, that he
bore rude weapons, and knew something of art; that he imagined he had a
soul, and pleased himself with the fancy that it was immortal. But let us not
laugh; there may be creatures in existence to whom we and our vanities and
profundities may seem as ludicrous.”
END OF PART SECOND

SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND
GIRLS

PART THIRD

Near the margin of the great river the scientists presently found a huge,
shapely stone, with this inscription:

“In 1847, in the spring, the river overflowed its banks and
covered the whole township. The depth was from two to six
feet. More than 900 head of cattle were lost, and many
homes destroyed. The Mayor ordered this memorial to be
erected to perpetuate the event. God spare us the repetition
of it!”

With infinite trouble, Professor Woodlouse succeeded in making a
translation of this inscription, which was sent home, and straightway an
enormous excitement was created about it. It confirmed, in a remarkable
way, certain treasured traditions of the ancients. The translation was slightly
marred by one or two untranslatable words, but these did not impair the
general clearness of the meaning. It is here presented:

“One thousand eight hundred and forty-seven years ago, the
(fires?) descended and consumed the whole city. Only some
nine hundred souls were saved, all others destroyed. The
(king?) commanded this stone to be set up to . . .
(untranslatable) . . . prevent the repetition of it.”

This was the first successful and satisfactory translation that had been
made of the mysterious character left behind him by extinct man, and it
gave Professor Woodlouse such reputation that at once every seat of
learning in his native land conferred a degree of the most illustrious grade
upon him, and it was believed that if he had been a soldier and had turned
his splendid talents to the extermination of a remote tribe of reptiles, the
king would have ennobled him and made him rich. And this, too, was the
origin of that school of scientists called Manologists, whose specialty is the
deciphering of the ancient records of the extinct bird termed Man. [For it is
now decided that Man was a bird and not a reptile.] But Professor
Woodlouse began and remained chief of these, for it was granted that no
translations were ever so free from error as his. Others made mistakes—he
seemed incapable of it. Many a memorial of the lost race was afterward
found, but none ever attained to the renown and veneration achieved by the
“Mayoritish Stone” it being so called from the word “Mayor” in it, which,
being translated “King,” “Mayoritish Stone” was but another way of saying
“King Stone.”
Another time the expedition made a great “find.” It was a vast round
flattish mass, ten frog-spans in diameter and five or six high. Professor
Snail put on his spectacles and examined it all around, and then climbed up
and inspected the top. He said:
“The result of my perlustration and perscontation of this isoperimetrical
protuberance is a belief at it is one of those rare and wonderful creations left

by the Mound Builders. The fact that this one is lamellibranchiate in its
formation, simply adds to its interest as being possibly of a different kind
from any we read of in the records of science, but yet in no manner marring
its authenticity. Let the megalophonous grasshopper sound a blast and
summon hither the perfunctory and circumforaneous Tumble-Bug, to the
end that excavations may be made and learning gather new treasures.”
Not a Tumble-Bug could be found on duty, so the Mound was excavated
by a working party of Ants. Nothing was discovered. This would have been
a great disappointment, had not the venerable Longlegs explained the
matter. He said:
“It is now plain to me that the mysterious and forgotten race of Mound
Builders did not always erect these edifices as mausoleums, else in this
case, as in all previous cases, their skeletons would be found here, along
with the rude implements which the creatures used in life. Is not this
manifest?”
“True! true!” from everybody.
“Then we have made a discovery of peculiar value here; a discovery
which greatly extends our knowledge of this creature in place of
diminishing it; a discovery which will add luster to the achievements of this
expedition and win for us the commendations of scholars everywhere. For
the absence of the customary relics here means nothing less than this: The
Mound Builder, instead of being the ignorant, savage reptile we have been
taught to consider him, was a creature of cultivation and high intelligence,
capable of not only appreciating worthy achievements of the great and
noble of his species, but of commemorating them! Fellow-scholars, this
stately Mound is not a sepulcher, it is a monument!”
A profound impression was produced by this.
But it was interrupted by rude and derisive laughter—and the Tumble-
Bug appeared.
“A monument!” quoth he. “A monument setup by a Mound Builder! Aye,
so it is! So it is, indeed, to the shrewd keen eye of science; but to an
ignorant poor devil who has never seen a college, it is not a Monument,
strictly speaking, but is yet a most rich and noble property; and with your
worship’s good permission I will proceed to manufacture it into spheres of
exceeding grace and—”

The Tumble-Bug was driven away with stripes, and the draftsmen of the
expedition were set to making views of the Monument from different
standpoints, while Professor Woodlouse, in a frenzy of scientific zeal,
traveled all over it and all around it hoping to find an inscription. But if
there had ever been one, it had decayed or been removed by some vandal as
a relic.
The views having been completed, it was now considered safe to load the
precious Monument itself upon the backs of four of the largest Tortoises
and send it home to the king’s museum, which was done; and when it
arrived it was received with enormous éclat and escorted to its future
abiding-place by thousands of enthusiastic citizens, King Bullfrog XVI.
himself attending and condescending to sit enthroned upon it throughout the
progress.

The growing rigor of the weather was now admonishing the scientists to
close their labors for the present, so they made preparations to journey
homeward. But even their last day among the Caverns bore fruit; for one of
the scholars found in an out-of-the-way corner of the Museum or “Burial
Place” a most strange and extraordinary thing. It was nothing less than a
double Man-Bird lashed together breast to breast by a natural ligament, and
labeled with the untranslatable words, “Siamese Twins.” The official report
concerning this thing closed thus:
“Wherefore it appears that there were in old times two distinct species of
this majestic fowl, the one being single and the other double. Nature has a
reason for all things. It is plain to the eye of science that the Double-Man
originally inhabited a region where dangers abounded; hence he was paired
together to the end that while one part slept the other might watch; and
likewise that, danger being discovered, there might always be a double
instead of a single power to oppose it. All honor to the mystery-dispelling
eye of godlike Science!”

And near the Double Man-Bird was found what was plainly an ancient
record of his, marked upon numberless sheets of a thin white substance and
bound together. Almost the first glance that Professor Woodlouse threw into
it revealed this following sentence, which he instantly translated and laid
before the scientists, in a tremble, and it uplifted every soul there with
exultation and astonishment:
“In truth it is believed by many that the lower animals reason and talk
together.”
When the great official report of the expedition appeared, the above
sentence bore this comment:
“Then there are lower animals than Man! This remarkable passage can
mean nothing else. Man himself is extinct, but they may still exist. What
can they be? Where do they inhabit? One’s enthusiasm bursts all bounds in
the contemplation of the brilliant field of discovery and investigation here
thrown open to science. We close our labors with the humble prayer that
your Majesty will immediately appoint a commission and command it to
rest not nor spare expense until the search for this hitherto unsuspected race
of the creatures of God shall be crowned with success.”
The expedition then journeyed homeward after its long absence and its
faithful endeavors, and was received with a mighty ovation by the whole
grateful country. There were vulgar, ignorant carpers, of course, as there
always are and always will be; and naturally one of these was the obscene
Tumble-Bug. He said that all he had learned by his travels was that science
only needed a spoonful of supposition to build a mountain of demonstrated
fact out of; and that for the future he meant to be content with the
knowledge that nature had made free to all creatures and not go prying into
the august secrets of the Deity.

MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP

[written about 1867]

I am not a private secretary to a senator any more now. I held the berth
two months in security and in great cheerfulness of spirit, but my bread
began to return from over the waters then—that is to say, my works came
back and revealed themselves. I judged it best to resign. The way of it was
this. My employer sent for me one morning tolerably early, and, as soon as I
had finished inserting some conundrums clandestinely into his last great
speech upon finance, I entered the presence. There was something
portentous in his appearance. His cravat was untied, his hair was in a state
of disorder, and his countenance bore about it the signs of a suppressed
storm. He held a package of letters in his tense grasp, and I knew that the
dreaded Pacific mail was in. He said:
“I thought you were worthy of confidence.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “I gave you a letter from certain of my constituents in the State
of Nevada, asking the establishment of a post-office at Baldwin’s Ranch,
and told you to answer it, as ingeniously as you could, with arguments
which should persuade them that there was no real necessity for an office at
that place.”
I felt easier. “Oh, if that is all, sir, I did do that.”
“Yes, you did. I will read your answer for your own humiliation:

‘WASHINGTON, Nov. 24

‘Messrs. Smith, Jones, and others.

‘GENTLEMEN: What the mischief do you suppose you want
with a post-office at Baldwin’s Ranch? It would not do you
any good. If any letters came there, you couldn’t read them,
you know; and, besides, such letters as ought to pass
through, with money in them, for other localities, would not
be likely to get through, you must perceive at once; and that
would make trouble for us all. No, don’t bother about a post-
office in your camp. I have your best interests at heart, and
feel that it would only be an ornamental folly. What you
want is a nice jail, you know—a nice, substantial jail and a
free school. These will be a lasting benefit to you. These will
make you really contented and happy. I will move in the
matter at once.

‘Very truly, etc.,
Mark Twain,

‘For James W. N———, U. S. Senator.’

“That is the way you answered that letter. Those people say they will
hang me, if I ever enter that district again; and I am perfectly satisfied they
will, too.”
“Well, sir, I did not know I was doing any harm. I only wanted to
convince them.”
“Ah. Well, you did convince them, I make no manner of doubt. Now,
here is another specimen. I gave you a petition from certain gentlemen of
Nevada, praying that I would get a bill through Congress incorporating the
Methodist Episcopal Church of the State of Nevada. I told you to say, in
reply, that the creation of such a law came more properly within the
province of the state legislature; and to endeavor to show them that, in the
present feebleness of the religious element in that new commonwealth, the
expediency of incorporating the church was questionable. What did you
write?

“‘WASHINGTON, Nov. 24.

“‘Rev. John Halifax and others.

“‘GENTLEMEN: You will have to go to the state legislature
about that speculation of yours—Congress don’t know
anything about religion. But don’t you hurry to go there,
either; because this thing you propose to do out in that new
country isn’t expedient—in fact, it is ridiculous. Your
religious people there are too feeble, in intellect, in morality,
in piety in everything, pretty much. You had better drop this
—you can’t make it work. You can’t issue stock on an
incorporation like that—or if you could, it would only keep
you in trouble all the time. The other denominations would
abuse it, and “bear” it, and “sell it short,” and break it
down. They would do with it just as they would with one of
your silver-mines out there—they would try to make all the
world believe it was “wildcat.” You ought not to do anything
that is calculated to bring a sacred thing into disrepute. You
ought to be ashamed of yourselves—that is what I think
about it. You close your petition with the words: “And we
will ever pray.” I think you had better—you need to do it.

“‘Very truly, etc.,
“‘MARK TWAIN,

“‘For James W. N——-, U. S. Senator.’

“That luminous epistle finishes me with the religious element among my
constituents. But that my political murder might be made sure, some evil
instinct prompted me to hand you this memorial from the grave company of
elders composing the board of aldermen of the city of San Francisco, to try
your hand upon—a memorial praying that the city’s right to the water-lots
upon the city front might be established by law of Congress. I told you this
was a dangerous matter to move in. I told you to write a non-committal
letter to the aldermen—an ambiguous letter—a letter that should avoid, as
far as possible, all real consideration and discussion of the water-lot
question. If there is any feeling left in you—any shame—surely this letter

you wrote, in obedience to that order, ought to evoke it, when its words fall
upon your ears:

‘WASHINGTON, Nov. 27

‘The Honorable Board of Aldermen, etc.

‘GENTLEMEN: George Washington, the revered Father of
his Country, is dead. His long and brilliant career is closed,
alas! forever. He was greatly respected in this section of the
country, and his untimely decease cast a gloom over the
whole community. He died on the 14th day of December,
1799. He passed peacefully away from the scene of his
honors and his great achievements, the most lamented hero
and the best beloved that ever earth hath yielded unto
Death. At such a time as this, you speak of water-lots! what
a lot was his!

‘What is fame! Fame is an accident. Sir Isaac Newton
discovered an apple falling to the ground—a trivial
discovery, truly, and one which a million men had made
before him—but his parents were influential, and so they
tortured that small circumstance into something wonderful,
and, lo! the simple world took up the shout and, in almost
the twinkling of an eye, that man was famous. Treasure these
thoughts.

‘Poesy, sweet poesy, who shall estimate what the world owes
to thee!

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as
snow—And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure
to go."

“Jack and Gill went up the hill
To draw a pail of water;

Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Gill came tumbling after.”

‘For simplicity, elegance of diction, and freedom from
immoral tendencies, I regard those two poems in the light of
gems. They are suited to all grades of intelligence, to every
sphere of life —to the field, to the nursery, to the guild.
Especially should no Board of Aldermen be without them.

‘Venerable fossils! write again. Nothing improves one so
much as friendly correspondence. Write again—and if there
is anything in this memorial of yours that refers to anything
in particular, do not be backward about explaining it. We
shall always be happy to hear you chirp.

‘Very truly, etc.,
“‘MARK TWAIN,

‘For James W. N——-, U. S. Senator.’

“That is an atrocious, a ruinous epistle! Distraction!”
“Well, sir, I am really sorry if there is anything wrong about it—but—but
it appears to me to dodge the water-lot question.”
“Dodge the mischief! Oh!—but never mind. As long as destruction must
come now, let it be complete. Let it be complete—let this last of your
performances, which I am about to read, make a finality of it. I am a ruined
man. I had my misgivings when I gave you the letter from Humboldt,
asking that the post route from Indian Gulch to Shakespeare Gap and
intermediate points be changed partly to the old Mormon trail. But I told
you it was a delicate question, and warned you to deal with it deftly—to
answer it dubiously, and leave them a little in the dark. And your fatal
imbecility impelled you to make this disastrous reply. I should think you
would stop your ears, if you are not dead to all shame:

“‘WASHINGTON, Nov. 30.

“‘Messers. Perkins, Wagner, et at.

“‘GENTLEMEN: It is a delicate question about this Indian
trail, but, handled with proper deftness and dubiousness, I
doubt not we shall succeed in some measure or otherwise,
because the place where the route leaves the Lassen
Meadows, over beyond where those two Shawnee chiefs,
Dilapidated Vengeance and Biter-of-the-Clouds, were
scalped last winter, this being the favorite direction to some,
but others preferring something else in consequence of
things, the Mormon trail leaving Mosby’s at three in the
morning, and passing through Jawbone Flat to Blucher, and
then down by Jug-Handle, the road passing to the right of it,
and naturally leaving it on the right, too, and Dawson’s on
the left of the trail where it passes to the left of said
Dawson’s and onward thence to Tomahawk, thus making the
route cheaper, easier of access to all who can get at it, and
compassing all the desirable objects so considered by
others, and, therefore, conferring the most good upon the
greatest number, and, consequently, I am encouraged to
hope we shall. However, I shall be ready, and happy, to
afford you still further information upon the subject, from
time to time, as you may desire it and the Post-office
Department be enabled to furnish it to me.

“‘Very truly, etc.,
“‘MARK TWAIN,

“‘For James W. N——-, U. S. Senator.’

“There—now what do you think of that?”
“Well, I don’t know, sir. It—well, it appears to me—to be dubious
enough.”

“Du—leave the house! I am a ruined man. Those Humboldt savages
never will forgive me for tangling their brains up with this inhuman letter. I
have lost the respect of the Methodist Church, the board of aldermen—”
“Well, I haven’t anything to say about that, because I may have missed it
a little in their cases, but I was too many for the Baldwin’s Ranch people,
General!”
“Leave the house! Leave it forever and forever, too.”
I regarded that as a sort of covert intimation that my service could be
dispensed with, and so I resigned. I never will be a private secretary to a
senator again. You can’t please that kind of people. They don’t know
anything. They can’t appreciate a party’s efforts.

A FASHION ITEM

[written about 1867]

At General G——’s reception the other night, the most fashionably
dressed lady was Mrs. G. C. She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front but
with a good deal of rake to it—to the train, I mean; it was said to be two or
three yards long. One could see it creeping along the floor some little time

after the woman was gone. Mrs. C. wore also a white bodice, cut bias, with
Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck, with the inside
handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves. She had on a pearl
necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that barren waste of
neck and shoulders. Her hair was frizzled into a tangled chaparral, forward
of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly bound and plaited into
a stump like a pony’s tail, and furthermore was canted upward at a sharp
angle, and ingeniously supported by a red velvet crupper, whose forward
extremity was made fast with a half-hitch around a hairpin on the top of her
head. Her whole top hamper was neat and becoming. She had a beautiful
complexion when she first came, but it faded out by degrees in an
unaccountable way. However, it is not lost for good. I found the most of it
on my shoulder afterward. (I stood near the door when she squeezed out
with the throng.) There were other ladies present, but I only took notes of
one as a specimen. I would gladly enlarge upon the subject were I able to do
it justice.

RILEY—NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT

One of the best men in Washington—or elsewhere—is RILEY,
correspondent of one of the great San Francisco dailies.
Riley is full of humor, and has an unfailing vein of irony, which makes
his conversation to the last degree entertaining (as long as the remarks are
about somebody else). But notwithstanding the possession of these
qualities, which should enable a man to write a happy and an appetizing
letter, Riley’s newspaper letters often display a more than earthly solemnity,

and likewise an unimaginative devotion to petrified facts, which surprise
and distress all men who know him in his unofficial character. He explains
this curious thing by saying that his employers sent him to Washington to
write facts, not fancy, and that several times he has come near losing his
situation by inserting humorous remarks which, not being looked for at
headquarters, and consequently not understood, were thought to be dark and
bloody speeches intended to convey signals and warnings to murderous
secret societies, or something of that kind, and so were scratched out with a
shiver and a prayer and cast into the stove. Riley says that sometimes he is
so afflicted with a yearning to write a sparkling and absorbingly readable
letter that he simply cannot resist it, and so he goes to his den and revels in
the delight of untrammeled scribbling; and then, with suffering such as only
a mother can know, he destroys the pretty children of his fancy and reduces
his letter to the required dismal accuracy. Having seen Riley do this very
thing more than once, I know whereof I speak. Often I have laughed with
him over a happy passage, and grieved to see him plow his pen through it.
He would say, “I had to write that or die; and I’ve got to scratch it out or
starve. They wouldn’t stand it, you know.”
I think Riley is about the most entertaining company I ever saw. We
lodged together in many places in Washington during the winter of ‘67-8,
moving comfortably from place to place, and attracting attention by paying
our board—a course which cannot fail to make a person conspicuous in
Washington. Riley would tell all about his trip to California in the early
days, by way of the Isthmus and the San Juan River; and about his baking
bread in San Francisco to gain a living, and setting up tenpins, and
practising law, and opening oysters, and delivering lectures, and teaching
French, and tending bar, and reporting for the newspapers, and keeping
dancing-schools, and interpreting Chinese in the courts—which latter was
lucrative, and Riley was doing handsomely and laying up a little money
when people began to find fault because his translations were too “free,” a
thing for which Riley considered he ought not to be held responsible, since
he did not know a word of the Chinese tongue, and only adopted
interpreting as a means of gaining an honest livelihood. Through the
machinations of enemies he was removed from the position of official
interpreter, and a man put in his place who was familiar with the Chinese
language, but did not know any English. And Riley used to tell about
publishing a newspaper up in what is Alaska now, but was only an iceberg

then, with a population composed of bears, walruses, Indians, and other
animals; and how the iceberg got adrift at last, and left all his paying
subscribers behind, and as soon as the commonwealth floated out of the
jurisdiction of Russia the people rose and threw off their allegiance and ran
up the English flag, calculating to hook on and become an English colony
as they drifted along down the British Possessions; but a land breeze and a
crooked current carried them by, and they ran up the Stars and Stripes and
steered for California, missed the connection again and swore allegiance to
Mexico, but it wasn’t any use; the anchors came home every time, and
away they went with the northeast trades drifting off sideways toward the
Sandwich Islands, whereupon they ran up the Cannibal flag and had a grand
human barbecue in honor of it, in which it was noticed that the better a man
liked a friend the better he enjoyed him; and as soon as they got fairly
within the tropics the weather got so fearfully hot that the iceberg began to
melt, and it got so sloppy under foot that it was almost impossible for ladies
to get about at all; and at last, just as they came in sight of the islands, the
melancholy remnant of the once majestic iceberg canted first to one side
and then to the other, and then plunged under forever, carrying the national
archives along with it—and not only the archives and the populace, but
some eligible town lots which had increased in value as fast as they
diminished in size in the tropics, and which Riley could have sold at thirty
cents a pound and made himself rich if he could have kept the province
afloat ten hours longer and got her into port.
Riley is very methodical, untiringly accommodating, never forgets
anything that is to be attended to, is a good son, a stanch friend, and a
permanent reliable enemy. He will put himself to any amount of trouble to
oblige a body, and therefore always has his hands full of things to be done
for the helpless and the shiftless. And he knows how to do nearly
everything, too. He is a man whose native benevolence is a well-spring that
never goes dry. He stands always ready to help whoever needs help, as far
as he is able—and not simply with his money, for that is a cheap and
common charity, but with hand and brain, and fatigue of limb and sacrifice
of time. This sort of men is rare.
Riley has a ready wit, a quickness and aptness at selecting and applying
quotations, and a countenance that is as solemn and as blank as the back
side of a tombstone when he is delivering a particularly exasperating joke.
One night a negro woman was burned to death in a house next door to us,

and Riley said that our landlady would be oppressively emotional at
breakfast, because she generally made use of such opportunities as offered,
being of a morbidly sentimental turn, and so we should find it best to let her
talk along and say nothing back—it was the only way to keep her tears out
of the gravy. Riley said there never was a funeral in the neighborhood but
that the gravy was watery for a week.
And, sure enough, at breakfast the landlady was down in the very sloughs
of woe—entirely brokenhearted. Everything she looked at reminded her of
that poor old negro woman, and so the buckwheat cakes made her sob, the
coffee forced a groan, and when the beefsteak came on she fetched a wail
that made our hair rise. Then she got to talking about deceased, and kept up
a steady drizzle till both of us were soaked through and through. Presently
she took a fresh breath and said, with a world of sobs:
“Ah, to think of it, only to think of it!—the poor old faithful creature. For
she was so faithful. Would you believe it, she had been a servant in that
selfsame house and that selfsame family for twenty seven years come
Christmas, and never a cross word and never a lick! And, oh, to think she
should meet such a death at last!—a-sitting over the red hot stove at three
o’clock in the morning and went to sleep and fell on it and was actually
roasted! Not just frizzled up a bit, but literally roasted to a crisp! Poor
faithful creature, how she was cooked! I am but a poor woman, but even if I
have to scrimp to do it, I will put up a tombstone over that lone sufferer’s
grave—and Mr. Riley if you would have the goodness to think up a little
epitaph to put on it which would sort of describe the awful way in which
she met her—”
“Put it, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’” said Riley, and never
smiled.

A FINE OLD MAN

John Wagner, the oldest man in Buffalo—one hundred and four years old
—recently walked a mile and a half in two weeks.
He is as cheerful and bright as any of these other old men that charge
around so persistently and tiresomely in the newspapers, and in every way
as remarkable.
Last November he walked five blocks in a rainstorm, without any shelter
but an umbrella, and cast his vote for Grant, remarking that he had voted for
forty-seven presidents—which was a lie.

His “second crop” of rich brown hair arrived from New York yesterday,
and he has a new set of teeth coming from—Philadelphia.
He is to be married next week to a girl one hundred and two years old,
who still takes in washing.
They have been engaged eighty years, but their parents persistently
refused their consent until three days ago.
John Wagner is two years older than the Rhode Island veteran, and yet
has never tasted a drop of liquor in his life—unless—unless you count
whisky.

SCIENCE V.S. LUCK

[written about 1867]

At that time, in Kentucky (said the Hon. Mr. K——-); the law was very
strict against what is termed “games of chance.” About a dozen of the boys
were detected playing “seven up” or “old sledge” for money, and the grand
jury found a true bill against them. Jim Sturgis was retained to defend them
when the case came up, of course. The more he studied over the matter, and
looked into the evidence, the plainer it was that he must lose a case at last—
there was no getting around that painful fact. Those boys had certainly been
betting money on a game of chance. Even public sympathy was roused in
behalf of Sturgis. People said it was a pity to see him mar his successful
career with a big prominent case like this, which must go against him.
But after several restless nights an inspired idea flashed upon Sturgis, and
he sprang out of bed delighted. He thought he saw his way through. The
next day he whispered around a little among his clients and a few friends,
and then when the case came up in court he acknowledged the seven-up and

the betting, and, as his sole defense, had the astounding effrontery to put in
the plea that old sledge was not a game of chance! There was the broadest
sort of a smile all over the faces of that sophisticated audience. The judge
smiled with the rest. But Sturgis maintained a countenance whose
earnestness was even severe. The opposite counsel tried to ridicule him out
of his position, and did not succeed. The judge jested in a ponderous
judicial way about the thing, but did not move him. The matter was
becoming grave. The judge lost a little of his patience, and said the joke had
gone far enough. Jim Sturgis said he knew of no joke in the matter—his
clients could not be punished for indulging in what some people chose to
consider a game of chance until it was proven that it was a game of chance.
Judge and counsel said that would be an easy matter, and forthwith called
Deacons Job, Peters, Burke, and Johnson, and Dominies Wirt and Miggles,
to testify; and they unanimously and with strong feeling put down the legal
quibble of Sturgis by pronouncing that old sledge was a game of chance.
“What do you call it now?” said the judge.
“I call it a game of science!” retorted Sturgis; “and I’ll prove it, too!”
They saw his little game.
He brought in a cloud of witnesses, and produced an overwhelming mass
of testimony, to show that old sledge was not a game of chance but a game
of science.
Instead of being the simplest case in the world, it had somehow turned
out to be an excessively knotty one. The judge scratched his head over it
awhile, and said there was no way of coming to a determination, because
just as many men could be brought into court who would testify on one side
as could be found to testify on the other. But he said he was willing to do
the fair thing by all parties, and would act upon any suggestion Mr. Sturgis
would make for the solution of the difficulty.
Mr. Sturgis was on his feet in a second.
“Impanel a jury of six of each, Luck versus Science. Give them candles
and a couple of decks of cards. Send them into the jury-room, and just abide
by the result!”
There was no disputing the fairness of the proposition. The four deacons
and the two dominies were sworn in as the “chance” jurymen, and six

inveterate old seven-up professors were chosen to represent the “science”
side of the issue. They retired to the jury-room.
In about two hours Deacon Peters sent into court to borrow three dollars
from a friend. [Sensation.] In about two hours more Dominie Miggles sent
into court to borrow a “stake” from a friend. [Sensation.] During the next
three or four hours the other dominie and the other deacons sent into court
for small loans. And still the packed audience waited, for it was a
prodigious occasion in Bull’s Corners, and one in which every father of a
family was necessarily interested.
The rest of the story can be told briefly. About daylight the jury came in,
and Deacon Job, the foreman, read the following:

VERDICT:

We, the jury in the case of the Commonwealth of Kentucky
vs. John Wheeler et al., have carefully considered the points
of the case, and tested the merits of the several theories
advanced, and do hereby unanimously decide that the game
commonly known as old sledge or seven-up is eminently a
game of science and not of chance. In demonstration
whereof it is hereby and herein stated, iterated, reiterated,
set forth, and made manifest that, during the entire night, the
“chance” men never won a game or turned a jack, although
both feats were common and frequent to the opposition; and
furthermore, in support of this our verdict, we call attention
to the significant fact that the “chance” men are all busted,
and the “science” men have got the money. It is the
deliberate opinion of this jury, that the “chance” theory
concerning seven-up is a pernicious doctrine, and
calculated to inflict untold suffering and pecuniary loss
upon any community that takes stock in it.

“That is the way that seven-up came to be set apart and particularized in
the statute-books of Kentucky as being a game not of chance but of science,
and therefore not punishable under the law,” said Mr. K——-. “That verdict
is of record, and holds good to this day.”

THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

[written about 1870]

[“Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just
as well.”—B. F.]
This party was one of those persons whom they call Philosophers. He
was twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of

Boston. These houses remain unto this day, and have signs upon them
worded in accordance with the facts. The signs are considered well enough
to have, though not necessary, because the inhabitants point out the two
birthplaces to the stranger anyhow, and sometimes as often as several times
in the same day. The subject of this memoir was of a vicious disposition,
and early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms
calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent
ages. His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held
up for the emulation of boys forever—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 smoldering fire, so that all other boys
might have to do that also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to
them.

Not satisfied with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on
bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal-time—a thing which has
brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read
Franklin’s pernicious biography.
His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot
follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those
everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two
cents’ worth of peanuts, his father says, “Remember what Franklin has said,
my son—‘A grout a day’s a penny a year”’; and the comfort is all gone out
of those peanuts. If he wants to spin his top when he has done work, his
father quotes, “Procrastination is the thief of time.” If he does a virtuous
action, he never gets anything for it, because “Virtue is its own reward.”
And that boy is hounded to death and robbed of his natural rest, because
Franklin, said once, in one of his inspired flights of malignity:

Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.

As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on
such terms. The sorrow that that maxim has cost me, through my parents,
experimenting 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 was a boy. If they had let me take my natural rest where would I
have been now? Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all.
And what an adroit old adventurer the subject of this memoir was! In
order to get a chance to fly his kite on Sunday he used to hang a key on the
string and let on to be fishing for lightning. And a guileless public would go
home chirping about the “wisdom” and the “genius” of the hoary Sabbath-
breaker. If anybody caught him playing “mumblepeg” 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 circumstances, but that he doubted whether it could be used with
accuracy at a long range.

Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and
made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a
son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the
simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he
worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become
wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel; and also to snub
his stove, and his military inspirations, his unseemly endeavor to make
himself conspicuous when he entered Philadelphia, and his flying his kite
and fooling away his time in all sorts of such ways when he ought to have
been foraging for soap-fat, or constructing candles.

I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent calamitous
idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great genius by
working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night
instead of waiting till morning like a Christian; and that this program,
rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father’s fool. It is time these
gentlemen were finding out that these execrable eccentricities of instinct
and conduct are only the evidences of genius, not the creators of it. I wish I
had been the father of my parents long enough to make them comprehend
this truth, and thus prepare them to let their son have an easier time of it.
When I was a child I had to boil soap, notwithstanding my father was
wealthy, and I had to get up early and study geometry at breakfast, and
peddle my own poetry, and do everything just as Franklin did, in the solemn
hope that I would be a Franklin some day. And here I am.

MR. BLOKE’S ITEM

[written about 1865]

Our esteemed friend, Mr. John William Bloke, of Virginia City, walked
into the office where we are sub-editor at a late hour last night, with an
expression of profound and heartfelt suffering upon his countenance, and,
sighing heavily, laid the following item reverently upon the desk, and

walked slowly out again. He paused a moment at the door, and seemed
struggling to command his feelings sufficiently to enable him to speak, and
then, nodding his head toward his manuscript, ejaculated in a broken voice,
“Friend of mine—oh! how sad!” and burst into tears. We were so moved at
his distress that we did not think to call him back and endeavor to comfort
him until he was gone, and it was too late. The paper had already gone to
press, but knowing that our friend would consider the publication of this
item important, and cherishing the hope that to print it would afford a
melancholy satisfaction to his sorrowing heart, we stopped the press at once
and inserted it in our columns:

DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.—Last evening, about six
o’clock, as Mr. William Schuyler, an old and respectable
citizen of South Park, was leaving his residence to go down-
town, as has been his usual custom for many years with the
exception only of a short interval in the spring of 1850,
during which he was confined to his bed by injuries received
in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly
placing himself directly in its wake and throwing up his
hands and shouting, which if he had done so even a single
moment sooner, must inevitably have frightened the animal
still more instead of checking its speed, although disastrous
enough to himself as it was, and rendered more melancholy
and distressing by reason of the presence of his wife’s
mother, who was there and saw the sad occurrence
notwithstanding it is at least likely, though not necessarily
so, that she should be reconnoitering in another direction
when incidents occur, not being vivacious and on the
lookout, as a general thing, but even the reverse, as her own
mother is said to have stated, who is no more, but died in the
full hope of a glorious resurrection, upwards of three years
ago; aged eighty-six, being a Christian woman and without
guile, as it were, or property, in consequence of the fire of
1849, which destroyed every single thing she had in the
world. But such is life. Let us all take warning by this
solemn occurrence, and let us endeavor so to conduct

ourselves that when we come to die we can do it. Let us
place our hands upon our heart, and say with earnestness
and sincerity that from this day forth we will beware of the
intoxicating bowl.—‘First Edition of the Californian.’

The head editor has been in here raising the mischief, and tearing his hair
and kicking the furniture about, and abusing me like a pickpocket. He says
that every time he leaves me in charge of the paper for half an hour I get
imposed upon by the first infant or the first idiot that comes along. And he
says that that distressing item of Mr. Bloke’s is nothing but a lot of
distressing bosh, and has no point to it, and no sense in it, and no
information in it, and that there was no sort of necessity for stopping the
press to publish it.
Now all this comes of being good-hearted. If I had been as
unaccommodating and unsympathetic as some people, I would have told
Mr. Bloke that I wouldn’t receive his communication at such a late hour;
but no, his snuffling distress touched my heart, and I jumped at the chance
of doing something to modify his misery. I never read his item to see
whether there was anything wrong about it, but hastily wrote the few lines
which preceded it, and sent it to the printers. And what has my kindness
done for me? It has done nothing but bring down upon me a storm of abuse
and ornamental blasphemy.
Now I will read that item myself, and see if there is any foundation for all
this fuss. And if there is, the author of it shall hear from me.
I have read it, and I am bound to admit that it seems a little mixed at a
first glance. However, I will peruse it once more.
I have read it again, and it does really seem a good deal more mixed than
ever.

I have read it over five times, but if I can get at the meaning of it I wish I
may get my just deserts. It won’t bear analysis. There are things about it
which I cannot understand at all. It don’t say whatever became of William
Schuyler. It just says enough about him to get one interested in his career,
and then drops him. Who is William Schuyler, anyhow, and what part of
South Park did he live in, and if he started down-town at six o’clock, did he
ever get there, and if he did, did anything happen to him? Is he the
individual that met with the “distressing accident”? Considering the
elaborate circumstantiality of detail observable in the item, it seems to me
that it ought to contain more information than it does. On the contrary, it is
obscure—and not only obscure, but utterly incomprehensible. Was the
breaking of Mr. Schuyler’s leg, fifteen years ago, the “distressing accident”
that plunged Mr. Bloke into unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up
here at dead of night and stop our press to acquaint the world with the
circumstance? Or did the “distressing accident” consist in the destruction of
Schuyler’s mother-in-law’s property in early times? Or did it consist in the
death of that person herself three years ago (albeit it does not appear that
she died by accident)? In a word, what did that “distressing accident”
consist in? What did that driveling ass of a Schuyler stand in the wake of a

runaway horse for, with his shouting and gesticulating, if he wanted to stop
him? And how the mischief could he get run over by a horse that had
already passed beyond him? And what are we to take “warning” by? And
how is this extraordinary chapter of incomprehensibilities going to be a
“lesson” to us? And, above all, what has the intoxicating “bowl” got to do
with it, anyhow? It is not stated that Schuyler drank, or that his wife drank,
or that his mother-in-law drank, or that the horse drank—wherefore, then,
the reference to the intoxicating bowl? It does seem to me that if Mr. Bloke
had let the intoxicating bowl alone himself, he never would have got into so
much trouble about this exasperating imaginary accident. I have read this
absurd item over and over again, with all its insinuating plausibility, until
my head swims; but I can make neither head nor tail of it. There certainly
seems to have been an accident of some kind or other, but it is impossible to
determine what the nature of it was, or who was the sufferer by it. I do not
like to do it, but I feel compelled to request that the next time anything
happens to one of Mr. Bloke’s friends, he will append such explanatory
notes to his account of it as will enable me to find out what sort of an
accident it was and whom it happened to. I had rather all his friends should
die than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to
cipher out the meaning of another such production as the above.

A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE [written about 1868]

CHAPTER I.

THE SECRET REVEALED.

It was night. Stillness reigned in the grand old feudal castle of
Klugenstein. The year 1222 was drawing to a close. Far away up in the
tallest of the castle’s towers a single light glimmered. A secret council was

being held there. The stern old lord of Klugenstein sat in a chair of state
meditating. Presently he said, with a tender accent:
“My daughter!”
A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,
answered:
“Speak, father!”
“My daughter, the time is come for the revealing of the mystery that hath
puzzled all your young life. Know, then, that it had its birth in the matters
which I shall now unfold. My brother Ulrich is the great Duke of
Brandenburgh. Our father, on his deathbed, decreed that if no son were born
to Ulrich, the succession should pass to my house, provided a son were born
to me. And further, in case no son were born to either, but only daughters,
then the succession should pass to Ulrich’s daughter, if she proved stainless;
if she did not, my daughter should succeed, if she retained a blameless
name. And so I, and my old wife here, prayed fervently for the good boon
of a son, but the prayer was vain. You were born to us. I was in despair. I
saw the mighty prize slipping from my grasp—the splendid dream
vanishing away. And I had been so hopeful! Five years had Ulrich lived in
wedlock, and yet his wife had borne no heir of either sex.
“‘But hold,’ I said, ‘all is not lost.’ A saving scheme had shot athwart my
brain. You were born at midnight. Only the leech, the nurse, and six
waiting-women knew your sex. I hanged them every one before an hour had
sped. Next morning all the barony went mad with rejoicing over the
proclamation that a son was born to Klugenstein—an heir to mighty
Brandenburgh! And well the secret has been kept. Your mother’s own sister
nursed your infancy, and from that time forward we feared nothing.
“When you were ten years old, a daughter was born to Ulrich. We
grieved, but hoped for good results from measles, or physicians, or other
natural enemies of infancy, but were always disappointed. She lived, she
throve—Heaven’s malison upon her! But it is nothing. We are safe. For, Ha-
ha! have we not a son? And is not our son the future Duke? Our well-
beloved Conrad, is it not so?—for, woman of eight-and-twenty years—as
you are, my child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!
“Now it hath come to pass that age hath laid its hand upon my brother,
and he waxes feeble. The cares of state do tax him sore, therefore he wills

that you shall come to him and be already—Duke in act, though not yet in
name. Your servitors are ready—you journey forth to-night.
“Now listen well. Remember every word I say. There is a law as old as
Germany, that if any woman sit for a single instant in the great ducal chair
before she hath been absolutely crowned in presence of the people, SHE
SHALL DIE! So heed my words. Pretend humility. Pronounce your
judgments from the Premier’s chair, which stands at the foot of the throne.
Do this until you are crowned and safe. It is not likely that your sex will
ever be discovered, but still it is the part of wisdom to make all things as
safe as may be in this treacherous earthly life.”
“Oh, my father, is it for this my life hath been a lie! Was it that I might
cheat my unoffending cousin of her rights? Spare me, father, spare your
child!”
“What, hussy! Is this my reward for the august fortune my brain has
wrought for thee? By the bones of my father, this puling sentiment of thine
but ill accords with my humor.
“Betake thee to the Duke, instantly! And beware how thou meddlest with
my purpose!”
Let this suffice, of the conversation. It is enough for us to know that the
prayers, the entreaties, and the tears of the gentle-natured girl availed
nothing. Neither they nor anything could move the stout old lord of
Klugenstein. And so, at last, with a heavy heart, the daughter saw the castle
gates close behind her, and found herself riding away in the darkness
surrounded by a knightly array of armed vassals and a brave following of
servants.
The old baron sat silent for many minutes after his daughter’s departure,
and then he turned to his sad wife and said:
“Dame, our matters seem speeding fairly. It is full three months since I
sent the shrewd and handsome Count Detzin on his devilish mission to my
brother’s daughter Constance. If he fail, we are not wholly safe; but if he do
succeed, no power can bar our girl from being Duchess e’en though ill-
fortune should decree she never should be Duke!”
“My heart is full of bodings, yet all may still be well.”
“Tush, woman! Leave the owls to croak. To bed with ye, and dream of
Brandenburgh and grandeur!”

CHAPTER II.

FESTIVITY AND TEARS

Six days after the occurrences related in the above chapter, the brilliant
capital of the Duchy of Brandenburgh was resplendent with military
pageantry, and noisy with the rejoicings of loyal multitudes, for Conrad, the
young heir to the crown, was come. The old duke’s heart was full of
happiness, for Conrad’s handsome person and graceful bearing had won his
love at once. The great halls of the palace were thronged with nobles, who
welcomed Conrad bravely; and so bright and happy did all things seem, that
he felt his fears and sorrows passing away and giving place to a comforting
contentment.
But in a remote apartment of the palace a scene of a different nature was
transpiring. By a window stood the duke’s only child, the Lady Constance.
Her eyes were red and swollen, and full of tears. She was alone. Presently
she fell to weeping anew, and said aloud:
“The villain Detzin is gone—has fled the dukedom! I could not believe it
at first, but alas! it is too true. And I loved him so. I dared to love him
though I knew the duke, my father, would never let me wed him. I loved
him—but now I hate him! With all my soul I hate him! Oh, what is to
become of me! I am lost, lost, lost! I shall go mad!”

CHAPTER III.

THE PLOT THICKENS

Few months drifted by. All men published the praises of the young
Conrad’s government and extolled the wisdom of his judgments, the
mercifulness of his sentences, and the modesty with which he bore himself
in his great office. The old duke soon gave everything into his hands, and
sat apart and listened with proud satisfaction while his heir delivered the
decrees of the crown from the seat of the premier. It seemed plain that one
so loved and praised and honored of all men as Conrad was, could not be
otherwise than happy. But, strangly enough, he was not. For he saw with
dismay that the Princess Constance had begun to love him! The love of the
rest of the world was happy fortune for him, but this was freighted with
danger! And he saw, moreover, that the delighted duke had discovered his
daughter’s passion likewise, and was already dreaming of a marriage. Every
day somewhat of the deep sadness that had been in the princess’s face faded
away; every day hope and animation beamed brighter from her eye; and by
and by even vagrant smiles visited the face that had been so troubled.
Conrad was appalled. He bitterly cursed himself for having yielded to the
instinct that had made him seek the companionship of one of his own sex
when he was new and a stranger in the palace—when he was sorrowful and
yearned for a sympathy such as only women can give or feel. He now began
to avoid his cousin. But this only made matters worse, for, naturally
enough, the more he avoided her the more she cast herself in his way. He
marveled at this at first, and next it startled him. The girl haunted him; she
hunted him; she happened upon him at all times and in all places, in the
night as well as in the day. She seemed singularly anxious. There was surely
a mystery somewhere.
This could not go on forever. All the world was talking about it. The duke
was beginning to look perplexed. Poor Conrad was becoming a very ghost
through dread and dire distress. One day as he was emerging from a private
ante-room attached to the picture-gallery, Constance confronted him, and
seizing both his hands, in hers, exclaimed:
“Oh, why do you avoid me? What have I done—what have I said, to lose
your kind opinion of me—for surely I had it once? Conrad, do not despise
me, but pity a tortured heart? I cannot,—cannot hold the words unspoken
longer, lest they kill me—I LOVE YOU, CONRAD! There, despise me if
you must, but they would be uttered!”

Conrad was speechless. Constance hesitated a moment, and then,
misinterpreting his silence, a wild gladness flamed in her eyes, and she
flung her arms about his neck and said:
“You relent! you relent! You can love me—you will love me! Oh, say
you will, my own, my worshipped Conrad!”
Conrad groaned aloud. A sickly pallor overspread his countenance, and
he trembled like an aspen. Presently, in desperation, he thrust the poor girl
from him, and cried:
“You know not what you ask! It is forever and ever impossible!” And
then he fled like a criminal, and left the princess stupefied with amazement.
A minute afterward she was crying and sobbing there, and Conrad was
crying and sobbing in his chamber. Both were in despair. Both saw ruin
staring them in the face.
By and by Constance rose slowly to her feet and moved away, saying:
“To think that he was despising my love at the very moment that I
thought it was melting his cruel heart! I hate him! He spurned me—did this
man—he spurned me from him like a dog!”

CHAPTER IV.

THE AWFUL REVELATION

Time passed on. A settled sadness rested once more upon the
countenance of the good duke’s daughter. She and Conrad were seen
together no more now. The duke grieved at this. But as the weeks wore
away, Conrad’s color came back to his cheeks and his old-time vivacity to
his eye, and he administered the government with a clear and steadily
ripening wisdom.
Presently a strange whisper began to be heard about the palace. It grew
louder; it spread farther. The gossips of the city got hold of it. It swept the
dukedom. And this is what the whisper said:
“The Lady Constance hath given birth to a child!”

When the lord of Klugenstein heard it, he swung his plumed helmet
thrice around his head and shouted:
“Long live Duke Conrad!—for lo, his crown is sure from this day
forward! Detzin has done his errand well, and the good scoundrel shall be
rewarded!”
And he spread the tidings far and wide, and for eight-and-forty hours no
soul in all the barony but did dance and sing, carouse and illuminate, to
celebrate the great event, and all at proud and happy old Klugenstein’s
expense.

CHAPTER V.

THE FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE

The trial was at hand. All the great lords and barons of Brandenburgh
were assembled in the Hall of Justice in the ducal palace. No space was left
unoccupied where there was room for a spectator to stand or sit. Conrad,
clad in purple and ermine, sat in the Premier’s chair, and on either side sat
the great judges of the realm. The old Duke had sternly commanded that the
trial of his daughter should proceed without favor, and then had taken to his
bed broken-hearted. His days were numbered. Poor Conrad had begged, as
for his very life, that he might be spared the misery of sitting in judgment
upon his cousin’s crime, but it did not avail.
The saddest heart in all that great assemblage was in Conrad’s breast.
The gladdest was in his father’s, for unknown to his daughter “Conrad,”
the old Baron Klugenstein was come, and was among the crowd of nobles,
triumphant in the swelling fortunes of his house.
After the heralds had made due proclamation and the other preliminaries
had followed, the venerable Lord Chief justice said:
“Prisoner, stand forth!”
The unhappy princess rose, and stood unveiled before the vast multitude.
The Lord Chief Justice continued:

“Most noble lady, before the great judges of this realm it hath been
charged and proven that out of holy wedlock your Grace hath given birth
unto a child; and by our ancient law the penalty is death, excepting in one
sole contingency whereof his Grace the acting Duke, our good Lord
Conrad, will advertise you in his solemn sentence now; wherefore, give
heed.”
Conrad stretched forth the reluctant sceptre, and in the selfsame moment
the womanly heart beneath his robe yearned pityingly toward the doomed
prisoner, and the tears came into his eyes. He opened his lips to speak, but
the Lord Chief Justice said quickly:
“Not there, your Grace, not there! It is not lawful to pronounce judgment
upon any of the ducal line SAVE FROM THE DUCAL THRONE!”
A shudder went to the heart of poor Conrad, and a tremor shook the iron
frame of his old father likewise. CONRAD HAD NOT BEEN CROWNED
—dared he profane the throne? He hesitated and turned pale with fear. But
it must be done. Wondering eyes were already upon him. They would be
suspicious eyes if he hesitated longer. He ascended the throne. Presently he
stretched forth the sceptre again, and said:
“Prisoner, in the name of our sovereign lord, Ulrich, Duke of
Brandenburgh, I proceed to the solemn duty that hath devolved upon me.
Give heed to my words. By the ancient law of the land, except you produce
the partner of your guilt and deliver him up to the executioner, you must
surely die. Embrace this opportunity—save yourself while yet you may.
Name the father of your child!”
A solemn hush fell upon the great court—a silence so profound that men
could hear their own hearts beat. Then the princess slowly turned, with eyes
gleaming with hate, and pointing her finger straight at Conrad, said:
“Thou art the man!”
An appalling conviction of his helpless, hopeless peril struck a chill to
Conrad’s heart like the chill of death itself. What power on earth could save
him! To disprove the charge he must reveal that he was a woman; and for an
uncrowned woman to sit in the ducal chair was death! At one and the same
moment he and his grim old father swooned and fell to the ground.

The remainder of this thrilling and eventful story will NOT be found in
this or any other publication, either now or at any future time.
The truth is, I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly close
place that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her) out of it
again—and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole business, and leave
that person to get out the best way that offers—or else stay there. I thought
it was going to be easy enough to straighten out that little difficulty, but it
looks different now.

PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT
TO THE HONORABLE THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED

Whereas, The Constitution guarantees equal rights to all,
backed by the Declaration of Independence; and
Whereas, Under our laws, the right of property in real
estate is perpetual; and
Whereas, Under our laws, the right of property in the
literary result of a citizen’s intellectual labor is restricted to
forty-two years; and
Whereas, Forty-two years seems an exceedingly just and
righteous term, and a sufficiently long one for the retention
of property;
Therefore, Your petitioner, having the good of his country
solely at heart, humbly prays that “equal rights” and fair
and equal treatment may be meted out to all citizens, by the
restriction of rights in all property, real estate included, to
the beneficent term of forty-two years. Then shall all men
bless your honorable body and be happy. And for this will
your petitioner ever pray.

MARK TWAIN.

A PARAGRAPH NOT ADDED TO THE PETITION

The charming absurdity of restricting property-rights in books to forty-
two years sticks prominently out in the fact that hardly any man’s books
ever live forty-two years, or even the half of it; and so, for the sake of
getting a shabby advantage of the heirs of about one Scott or Burns or
Milton in a hundred years, the lawmakers of the “Great” Republic are
content to leave that poor little pilfering edict upon the statute-books. It is
like an emperor lying in wait to rob a phoenix’s nest, and waiting the
necessary century to get the chance.

AFTER-DINNER SPEECH
[AT A FOURTH OF JULY GATHERING, IN LONDON, OF
AMERICANS]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I thank you for
the compliment which has just been tendered me, and to show my
appreciation of it I will not afflict you with many words. It is pleasant to
celebrate in this peaceful way, upon this old mother soil, the anniversary of
an experiment which was born of war with this same land so long ago, and
wrought out to a successful issue by the devotion of our ancestors. It has
taken nearly a hundred years to bring the English and Americans into kindly
and mutually appreciative relations, but I believe it has been accomplished
at last. It was a great step when the two last misunderstandings were settled
by arbitration instead of cannon. It is another great step when England
adopts our sewing-machines without claiming the invention—as usual. It
was another when they imported one of our sleeping-cars the other day. And
it warmed my heart more than I can tell, yesterday, when I witnessed the
spectacle of an Englishman ordering an American sherry cobbler of his own
free will and accord—and not only that but with a great brain and a level
head reminding the barkeeper not to forget the strawberries. With a
common origin, a common language, a common literature, a common
religion and—common drinks, what is longer needful to the cementing of
the two nations together in a permanent bond of brotherhood?
This is an age of progress, and ours is a progressive land. A great and
glorious land, too—a land which has developed a Washington, a Franklin, a
William M. Tweed, a Longfellow, a Motley, a Jay Gould, a Samuel C.
Pomeroy, a recent Congress which has never had its equal (in some
respects), and a United States Army which conquered sixty Indians in eight
months by tiring them out—which is much better than uncivilized
slaughter, God knows. We have a criminal jury system which is superior to
any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of
finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.

And I may observe that we have an insanity plea that would have saved
Cain. I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures
that bring higher prices than any in the world.
I refer with effusion to our railway system, which consents to let us live,
though it might do the opposite, being our owners. It only destroyed three
thousand and seventy lives last year by collisions, and twenty-seven
thousand two hundred and sixty by running over heedless and unnecessary
people at crossings. The companies seriously regretted the killing of these
thirty thousand people, and went so far as to pay for some of them—
voluntarily, of course, for the meanest of us would not claim that we
possess a court treacherous enough to enforce a law against a railway
company. But, thank Heaven, the railway companies are generally disposed
to do the right and kindly thing without compulsion. I know of an instance
which greatly touched me at the time. After an accident the company sent
home the remains of a dear distant old relative of mine in a basket, with the
remark, “Please state what figure you hold him at—and return the basket.”
Now there couldn’t be anything friendlier than that.
But I must not stand here and brag all night. However, you won’t mind a
body bragging a little about his country on the fourth of July. It is a fair and
legitimate time to fly the eagle. I will say only one more word of brag—and
a hopeful one. It is this. We have a form of government which gives each
man a fair chance and no favor. With us no individual is born with a right to
look down upon his neighbor and hold him in contempt. Let such of us as
are not dukes find our consolation in that. And we may find hope for the
future in the fact that as unhappy as is the condition of our political morality
to-day, England has risen up out of a far fouler since the days when Charles
I. ennobled courtesans and all political place was a matter of bargain and
sale. There is hope for us yet.

[At least the above is the speech which I was going to
make, but our minister, General Schenck, presided, and after
the blessing, got up and made a great long inconceivably
dull harangue, and wound up by saying that inasmuch as
speech-making did not seem to exhilarate the guests much,
all further oratory would be dispensed with during the
evening, and we could just sit and talk privately to our
elbow-neighbors and have a good sociable time. It is known

that in consequence of that remark forty-four perfected
speeches died in the womb. The depression, the gloom, the
solemnity that reigned over the banquet from that time forth
will be a lasting memory with many that were there. By that
one thoughtless remark General Schenck lost forty-four of
the best friends he had in England. More than one said that
night, “And this is the sort of person that is sent to represent
us in a great sister empire!”]

LIONIZING MURDERERS

I had heard so much about the celebrated fortune-teller Madame— —,
that I went to see her yesterday. She has a dark complexion naturally, and
this effect is heightened by artificial aids which cost her nothing. She wears
curls—very black ones, and I had an impression that she gave their native
attractiveness a lift with rancid butter. She wears a reddish check
handkerchief, cast loosely around her neck, and it was plain that her other
one is slow getting back from the wash. I presume she takes snuff. At any
rate, something resembling it had lodged among the hairs sprouting from

her upper lip. I know she likes garlic—I knew that as soon as she sighed.
She looked at me searchingly for nearly a minute, with her black eyes, and
then said:
“It is enough. Come!”
She started down a very dark and dismal corridor—I stepping close after
her. Presently she stopped, and said that, as the way was so crooked and
dark, perhaps she had better get a light. But it seemed ungallant to allow a
woman to put herself to so much trouble for me, and so I said:
“It is not worth while, madam. If you will heave another sigh, I think I
can follow it.”
So we got along all right. Arrived at her official and mysterious den, she
asked me to tell her the date of my birth, the exact hour of that occurrence,
and the color of my grandmother’s hair. I answered as accurately as I could.
Then she said:
“Young man, summon your fortitude—do not tremble. I am about to
reveal the past.”
“Information concerning the future would be, in a general way, more—”
“Silence! You have had much trouble, some joy, some good fortune,
some bad. Your great grandfather was hanged.”
“That is a l—”
“Silence! Hanged sir. But it was not his fault. He could not help it.”
“I am glad you do him justice.”
“Ah—grieve, rather, that the jury did. He was hanged. His star crosses
yours in the fourth division, fifth sphere. Consequently you will be hanged
also.”
“In view of this cheerful—”
“I must have silence. Yours was not, in the beginning, a criminal nature,
but circumstances changed it. At the age of nine you stole sugar. At the age
of fifteen you stole money. At twenty you stole horses. At twenty-five you
committed arson. At thirty, hardened in crime, you became an editor. You
are now a public lecturer. Worse things are in store for you. You will be sent
to Congress. Next, to the penitentiary. Finally, happiness will come again—
all will be well—you will be hanged.”

I was now in tears. It seemed hard enough to go to Congress; but to be
hanged—this was too sad, too dreadful. The woman seemed surprised at my
grief. I told her the thoughts that were in my mind. Then she comforted me.
“Why, man,” she said, “hold up your head—you have nothing to grieve
about. Listen.
—[In this paragraph the fortune-teller details the exact history of the
Pike-Brown assassination case in New Hampshire, from the succoring and
saving of the stranger Pike by the Browns, to the subsequent hanging and
coffining of that treacherous miscreant. She adds nothing, invents nothing,
exaggerates nothing (see any New England paper for November, 1869).
This Pike-Brown case is selected merely as a type, to illustrate a custom
that prevails, not in New Hampshire alone, but in every state in the Union—
I mean the sentimental custom of visiting, petting, glorifying, and snuffling
over murderers like this Pike, from the day they enter the jail under
sentence of death until they swing from the gallows. The following extract
from the Temple Bar (1866) reveals the fact that this custom is not confined
to the United States.—“on December 31, 1841, a man named John Johnes,
a shoemaker, murdered his sweetheart, Mary Hallam, the daughter of a
respectable laborer, at Mansfield, in the county of Nottingham. He was
executed on March 23, 1842. He was a man of unsteady habits, and gave
way to violent fits of passion. The girl declined his addresses, and he said if
he did not have her no one else should. After he had inflicted the first
wound, which was not immediately fatal, she begged for her life, but seeing
him resolved, asked for time to pray. He said that he would pray for both,
and completed the crime. The wounds were inflicted by a shoemaker’s
knife, and her throat was cut barbarously. After this he dropped on his knees
some time, and prayed God to have mercy on two unfortunate lovers. He
made no attempt to escape, and confessed the crime. After his imprisonment
he behaved in a most decorous manner; he won upon the good opinion of
the jail chaplain, and he was visited by the Bishop of Lincoln. It does not
appear that he expressed any contrition for the crime, but seemed to pass
away with triumphant certainty that he was going to rejoin his victim in
heaven. He was visited by some pious and benevolent ladies of Nottingham,
some of whom declared he was a child of God, if ever there was one. One
of the ladies sent him a white camellia to wear at his execution.”]

“You will live in New Hampshire. In your sharp need and distress the
Brown family will succor you—such of them as Pike the assassin left alive.
They will be benefactors to you. When you shall have grown fat upon their
bounty, and are grateful and happy, you will desire to make some modest
return for these things, and so you will go to the house some night and brain
the whole family with an ax. You will rob the dead bodies of your
benefactors, and disburse your gains in riotous living among the rowdies
and courtesans of Boston. Then you will be arrested, tried, condemned to be
hanged, thrown into prison. Now is your happy day. You will be converted
—you will be converted just as soon as every effort to compass pardon,
commutation, or reprieve has failed—and then!—Why, then, every morning
and every afternoon, the best and purest young ladies of the village will
assemble in your cell and sing hymns. This will show that assassination is
respectable. Then you will write a touching letter, in which you will forgive
all those recent Browns. This will excite the public admiration. No public
can withstand magnanimity. Next, they will take you to the scaffold, with
great éclat, at the head of an imposing procession composed of clergymen,
officials, citizens generally, and young ladies walking pensively two and
two, and bearing bouquets and immortelles. You will mount the scaffold,
and while the great concourse stand uncovered in your presence, you will
read your sappy little speech which the minister has written for you. And
then, in the midst of a grand and impressive silence, they will swing you
into per—Paradise, my son. There will not be a dry eye on the ground. You
will be a hero! Not a rough there but will envy you. Not a rough there but
will resolve to emulate you. And next, a great procession will follow you to
the tomb—will weep over your remains—the young ladies will sing again
the hymns made dear by sweet associations connected with the jail, and, as
a last tribute of affection, respect, and appreciation of your many sterling
qualities, they will walk two and two around your bier, and strew wreaths of
flowers on it. And lo! you are canonized.

Think of it, son-ingrate, assassin, robber of the dead, drunken brawler
among thieves and harlots in the slums of Boston one month, and the pet of
the pure and innocent daughters of the land the next! A bloody and hateful
devil—a bewept, bewailed, and sainted martyr—all in a month! Fool!—so
noble a fortune, and yet you sit here grieving!”
“No, madam,” I said, “you do me wrong, you do, indeed. I am perfectly
satisfied. I did not know before that my great-grandfather was hanged, but it
is of no consequence. He has probably ceased to bother about it by this time
—and I have not commenced yet. I confess, madam, that I do something in
the way of editing and lecturing, but the other crimes you mention have
escaped my memory. Yet I must have committed them—you would not
deceive a stranger. But let the past be as it was, and let the future be as it
may—these are nothing. I have only cared for one thing. I have always felt
that I should be hanged some day, and somehow the thought has annoyed
me considerably; but if you can only assure me that I shall be hanged in
New Hampshire—”
“Not a shadow of a doubt!”
“Bless you, my benefactress!—excuse this embrace—you have removed
a great load from my breast. To be hanged in New Hampshire is happiness
—it leaves an honored name behind a man, and introduces him at once into
the best New Hampshire society in the other world.”
I then took leave of the fortune-teller. But, seriously, is it well to glorify a
murderous villain on the scaffold, as Pike was glorified in New Hampshire?

Is it well to turn the penalty for a bloody crime into a reward? Is it just to do
it? Is it safe?

A NEW CRIME
LEGISLATION NEEDED

This country, during the last thirty or forty years, has produced some of
the most remarkable cases of insanity of which there is any mention in
history. For instance, there was the Baldwin case, in Ohio, twenty-two years
ago. Baldwin, from his boyhood up, had been of a vindictive, malignant,
quarrelsome nature. He put a boy’s eye out once, and never was heard upon
any occasion to utter a regret for it. He did many such things. But at last he
did something that was serious. He called at a house just after dark one

evening, knocked, and when the occupant came to the door, shot him dead,
and then tried to escape, but was captured. Two days before, he had
wantonly insulted a helpless cripple, and the man he afterward took swift
vengeance upon with an assassin bullet had knocked him down. Such was
the Baldwin case. The trial was long and exciting; the community was
fearfully wrought up. Men said this spiteful, bad-hearted villain had caused
grief enough in his time, and now he should satisfy the law. But they were
mistaken; Baldwin was insane when he did the deed—they had not thought
of that. By the argument of counsel it was shown that at half past ten in the
morning on the day of the murder, Baldwin became insane, and remained so
for eleven hours and a half exactly. This just covered the case comfortably,
and he was acquitted. Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had
been listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor crazy creature
would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of
madness. Baldwin went clear, and although his relatives and friends were
naturally incensed against the community for their injurious suspicions and
remarks, they said let it go for this time, and did not prosecute. The
Baldwins were very wealthy. This same Baldwin had momentary fits of
insanity twice afterward, and on both occasions killed people he had
grudges against. And on both these occasions the circumstances of the
killing were so aggravated, and the murders so seemingly heartless and
treacherous, that if Baldwin had not been insane he would have been
hanged without the shadow of a doubt. As it was, it required all his political
and family influence to get him clear in one of the cases, and cost him not
less than ten thousand dollars to get clear in the other. One of these men he
had notoriously been threatening to kill for twelve years. The poor creature
happened, by the merest piece of ill fortune, to come along a dark alley at
the very moment that Baldwin’s insanity came upon him, and so he was
shot in the back with a gun loaded with slugs.
Take the case of Lynch Hackett, of Pennsylvania. Twice, in public, he
attacked a German butcher by the name of Bemis Feldner, with a cane, and
both times Feldner whipped him with his fists. Hackett was a vain, wealthy,
violent gentleman, who held his blood and family in high esteem, and
believed that a reverent respect was due to his great riches. He brooded over
the shame of his chastisement for two weeks, and then, in a momentary fit
of insanity, armed himself to the teeth, rode into town, waited a couple of
hours until he saw Feldner coming down the street with his wife on his arm,

and then, as the couple passed the doorway in which he had partially
concealed himself, he drove a knife into Feldner’s neck, killing him
instantly. The widow caught the limp form and eased it to the earth. Both
were drenched with blood. Hackett jocosely remarked to her that as a
professional butcher’s recent wife she could appreciate the artistic neatness
of the job that left her in condition to marry again, in case she wanted to.
This remark, and another which he made to a friend, that his position in
society made the killing of an obscure citizen simply an “eccentricity”
instead of a crime, were shown to be evidences of insanity, and so Hackett
escaped punishment. The jury were hardly inclined to accept these as proofs
at first, inasmuch as the prisoner had never been insane before the murder,
and under the tranquilizing effect of the butchering had immediately
regained his right mind; but when the defense came to show that a third
cousin of Hackett’s wife’s stepfather was insane, and not only insane, but
had a nose the very counterpart of Hackett’s, it was plain that insanity was
hereditary in the family, and Hackett had come by it by legitimate
inheritance.
Of course the jury then acquitted him. But it was a merciful providence
that Mrs. H.’s people had been afflicted as shown, else Hackett would
certainly have been hanged.
However, it is not possible to recount all the marvelous cases of insanity
that have come under the public notice in the last thirty or forty years. There
was the Durgin case in New Jersey three years ago. The servant girl,
Bridget Durgin, at dead of night, invaded her mistress’s bedroom and
carved the lady literally to pieces with a knife. Then she dragged the body
to the middle of the floor, and beat and banged it with chairs and such
things. Next she opened the feather beds, and strewed the contents around,
saturated everything with kerosene, and set fire to the general wreck. She
now took up the young child of the murdered woman in her blood smeared
hands and walked off, through the snow, with no shoes on, to a neighbor’s
house a quarter of a mile off, and told a string of wild, incoherent stories
about some men coming and setting fire to the house; and then she cried
piteously, and without seeming to think there was anything suggestive about
the blood upon her hands, her clothing, and the baby, volunteered the
remark that she was afraid those men had murdered her mistress!
Afterward, by her own confession and other testimony, it was proved that
the mistress had always been kind to the girl, consequently there was no

revenge in the murder; and it was also shown that the girl took nothing
away from the burning house, not even her own shoes, and consequently
robbery was not the motive.
Now, the reader says, “Here comes that same old plea of insanity again.”
But the reader has deceived himself this time. No such plea was offered in
her defense. The judge sentenced her, nobody persecuted the governor with
petitions for her pardon, and she was promptly hanged.
There was that youth in Pennsylvania, whose curious confession was
published some years ago. It was simply a conglomeration of incoherent
drivel from beginning to end, and so was his lengthy speech on the scaffold
afterward. For a whole year he was haunted with a desire to disfigure a
certain young woman, so that no one would marry her. He did not love her
himself, and did not want to marry her, but he did not want anybody else to
do it. He would not go anywhere with her, and yet was opposed to anybody
else’s escorting her. Upon one occasion he declined to go to a wedding with
her, and when she got other company, lay in wait for the couple by the road,
intending to make them go back or kill the escort. After spending sleepless
nights over his ruling desire for a full year, he at last attempted its execution
—that is, attempted to disfigure the young woman. It was a success. It was
permanent. In trying to shoot her cheek (as she sat at the supper-table with
her parents and brothers and sisters) in such a manner as to mar its
comeliness, one of his bullets wandered a little out of the course, and she
dropped dead. To the very last moment of his life he bewailed the ill luck
that made her move her face just at the critical moment. And so he died,
apparently about half persuaded that somehow it was chiefly her own fault
that she got killed. This idiot was hanged. The plea of insanity was not
offered.
Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world, and crime is dying out.
There are no longer any murders—none worth mentioning, at any rate.
Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane—but
now, if you, having friends and money, kill a man, it is evidence that you
are a lunatic. In these days, too, if a person of good family and high social
standing steals anything, they call it kleptomania, and send him to the
lunatic asylum. If a person of high standing squanders his fortune in
dissipation, and closes his career with strychnine or a bullet, “Temporary
Aberration” is what was the trouble with him.

Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common
that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case
that comes before the courts? And is it not so cheap, and so common, and
often so trivial, that the reader smiles in derision when the newspaper
mentions it? And is it not curious to note how very often it wins acquittal
for the prisoner? Of late years it does not seem possible for a man to so
conduct himself, before killing another man, as not to be manifestly insane.
If he talks about the stars, he is insane. If he appears nervous and uneasy an
hour before the killing, he is insane. If he weeps over a great grief, his
friends shake their heads, and fear that he is “not right.” If, an hour after the
murder, he seems ill at ease, preoccupied, and excited, he is, unquestionably
insane.
Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against
insanity. There is where the true evil lies.

A CURIOUS DREAM [Written about 1870.]
CONTAINING A MORAL

Night before last I had a singular dream. I seemed to be sitting on a
doorstep (in no particular city perhaps) ruminating, and the time of night
appeared to be about twelve or one o’clock. The weather was balmy and
delicious. There was no human sound in the air, not even a footstep. There
was no sound of any kind to emphasize the dead stillness, except the
occasional hollow barking of a dog in the distance and the fainter answer of
a further dog. Presently up the street I heard a bony clack-clacking, and
guessed it was the castanets of a serenading party. In a minute more a tall
skeleton, hooded, and half clad in a tattered and moldy shroud, whose
shreds were flapping about the ribby latticework of its person, swung by me
with a stately stride and disappeared in the gray gloom of the starlight. It

had a broken and worm-eaten coffin on its shoulder and a bundle of
something in its hand. I knew what the clack-clacking was then; it was this
party’s joints working together, and his elbows knocking against his sides as
he walked. I may say I was surprised. Before I could collect my thoughts
and enter upon any speculations as to what this apparition might portend, I
heard another one coming for I recognized his clack-clack. He had two-
thirds of a coffin on his shoulder, and some foot and head boards under his
arm. I mightily wanted to peer under his hood and speak to him, but when
he turned and smiled upon me with his cavernous sockets and his projecting
grin as he went by, I thought I would not detain him. He was hardly gone
when I heard the clacking again, and another one issued from the shadowy
half-light. This one was bending under a heavy gravestone, and dragging a
shabby coffin after him by a string. When he got to me he gave me a steady
look for a moment or two, and then rounded to and backed up to me,
saying:
“Ease this down for a fellow, will you?”
I eased the gravestone down till it rested on the ground, and in doing so
noticed that it bore the name of “John Baxter Copmanhurst,” with “May,
1839,” as the date of his death. Deceased sat wearily down by me, and
wiped his os frontis with his major maxillary—chiefly from former habit I
judged, for I could not see that he brought away any perspiration.
“It is too bad, too bad,” said he, drawing the remnant of the shroud about
him and leaning his jaw pensively on his hand. Then he put his left foot up
on his knee and fell to scratching his anklebone absently with a rusty nail
which he got out of his coffin.
“What is too bad, friend?”
“Oh, everything, everything. I almost wish I never had died.”
“You surprise me. Why do you say this? Has anything gone wrong? What
is the matter?”
“Matter! Look at this shroud-rags. Look at this gravestone, all battered
up. Look at that disgraceful old coffin. All a man’s property going to ruin
and destruction before his eyes, and ask him if anything is wrong? Fire and
brimstone!”
“Calm yourself, calm yourself,” I said. “It is too bad—it is certainly too
bad, but then I had not supposed that you would much mind such matters,

situated as you are.”
“Well, my dear sir, I do mind them. My pride is hurt, and my comfort is
impaired—destroyed, I might say. I will state my case—I will put it to you
in such a way that you can comprehend it, if you will let me,” said the poor
skeleton, tilting the hood of his shroud back, as if he were clearing for
action, and thus unconsciously giving himself a jaunty and festive air very
much at variance with the grave character of his position in life—so to
speak—and in prominent contrast with his distressful mood.
“Proceed,” said I.
“I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here, in
this street—there, now, I just expected that cartilage would let go!—third
rib from the bottom, friend, hitch the end of it to my spine with a string, if
you have got such a thing about you, though a bit of silver wire is a deal
pleasanter, and more durable and becoming, if one keeps it polished—to
think of shredding out and going to pieces in this way, just on account of
the indifference and neglect of one’s posterity!”—and the poor ghost grated
his teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a shiver—for the effect is
mightily increased by the absence of muffling flesh and cuticle. “I reside in
that old graveyard, and have for these thirty years; and I tell you things are
changed since I first laid this old tired frame there, and turned over, and
stretched out for a long sleep, with a delicious sense upon me of being done
with bother, and grief, and anxiety, and doubt, and fear, forever and ever,
and listening with comfortable and increasing satisfaction to the sexton’s
work, from the startling clatter of his first spadeful on my coffin till it
dulled away to the faint patting that shaped the roof of my new home—
delicious! My! I wish you could try it to-night!” and out of my reverie
deceased fetched me a rattling slap with a bony hand.
“Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there, and was happy. For it was
out in the country then—out in the breezy, flowery, grand old woods, and
the lazy winds gossiped with the leaves, and the squirrels capered over us
and around us, and the creeping things visited us, and the birds filled the
tranquil solitude with music. Ah, it was worth ten years of a man’s life to be
dead then! Everything was pleasant. I was in a good neighborhood, for all
the dead people that lived near me belonged to the best families in the city.
Our posterity appeared to think the world of us. They kept our graves in the
very best condition; the fences were always in faultless repair, head-boards

were kept painted or whitewashed, and were replaced with new ones as
soon as they began to look rusty or decayed; monuments were kept upright,
railings intact and bright, the rose-bushes and shrubbery trimmed, trained,
and free from blemish, the walks clean and smooth and graveled. But that
day is gone by. Our descendants have forgotten us. My grandson lives in a
stately house built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep
in a neglected grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build
them nests withal! I and friends that lie with me founded and secured the
prosperity of this fine city, and the stately bantling of our loves leaves us to
rot in a dilapidated cemetery which neighbors curse and strangers scoff at.
See the difference between the old time and this—for instance: Our graves
are all caved in now; our head-boards have rotted away and tumbled down;
our railings reel this way and that, with one foot in the air, after a fashion of
unseemly levity; our monuments lean wearily, and our gravestones bow
their heads discouraged; there be no adornments any more—no roses, nor
shrubs, nor graveled walks, nor anything that is a comfort to the eye; and
even the paintless old board fence that did make a show of holding us
sacred from companionship with beasts and the defilement of heedless feet,
has tottered till it overhangs the street, and only advertises the presence of
our dismal resting-place and invites yet more derision to it. And now we
cannot hide our poverty and tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has
stretched its withering arms abroad and taken us in, and all that remains of
the cheer of our old home is the cluster of lugubrious forest trees that stand,
bored and weary of a city life, with their feet in our coffins, looking into the
hazy distance and wishing they were there. I tell you it is disgraceful!

“You begin to comprehend—you begin to see how it is. While our
descendants are living sumptuously on our money, right around us in the
city, we have to fight hard to keep skull and bones together. Bless you, there
isn’t a grave in our cemetery that doesn’t leak—not one. Every time it rains
in the night we have to climb out and roost in the trees, and sometimes we
are wakened suddenly by the chilly water trickling down the back of our
necks. Then I tell you there is a general heaving up of old graves and
kicking over of old monuments, and scampering of old skeletons for the
trees! Bless me, if you had gone along there some such nights after twelve
you might have seen as many as fifteen of us roosting on one limb, with our
joints rattling drearily and the wind wheezing through our ribs! Many a
time we have perched there for three or four dreary hours, and then come
down, stiff and chilled through and drowsy, and borrowed each other’s
skulls to bail out our graves with—if you will glance up in my mouth now
as I tilt my head back, you can see that my head-piece is half full of old dry
sediment—how top-heavy and stupid it makes me sometimes! Yes, sir,
many a time if you had happened to come along just before the dawn you’d
have caught us bailing out the graves and hanging our shrouds on the fence
to dry. Why, I had an elegant shroud stolen from there one morning—think
a party by the name of Smith took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard
over yonder—I think so because the first time I ever saw him he hadn’t
anything on but a check shirt, and the last time I saw him, which was at a
social gathering in the new cemetery, he was the best-dressed corpse in the
company—and it is a significant fact that he left when he saw me; and
presently an old woman from here missed her coffin—she generally took it
with her when she went anywhere, because she was liable to take cold and
bring on the spasmodic rheumatism that originally killed her if she exposed
herself to the night air much. She was named Hotchkiss—Anna Matilda
Hotchkiss—you might know her? She has two upper front teeth, is tall, but
a good deal inclined to stoop, one rib on the left side gone, has one shred of
rusty hair hanging from the left side of her head, and one little tuft just
above and a little forward of her right ear, has her underjaw wired on one
side where it had worked loose, small bone of left forearm gone—lost in a
fight—has a kind of swagger in her gait and a ‘gallus’ way of going with
her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the air—has been pretty free and easy,

and is all damaged and battered up till she looks like a queensware crate in
ruins—maybe you have met her?”

“God forbid!” I involuntarily ejaculated, for somehow I was not looking
for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard. But I
hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, “I simply meant I had
not had the honor—for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a
friend of yours. You were saying that you were robbed—and it was a
shame, too—but it appears by what is left of the shroud you have on that it
was a costly one in its day. How did—”

A most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features
and shriveled integuments of my guest’s face, and I was beginning to grow
uneasy and distressed, when he told me he was only working up a deep, sly
smile, with a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired his
present garment a ghost in a neighboring cemetery missed one. This
reassured me, but I begged him to confine himself to speech thenceforth,
because his facial expression was uncertain. Even with the most elaborate
care it was liable to miss fire. Smiling should especially be avoided. What
he might honestly consider a shining success was likely to strike me in a
very different light. I said I liked to see a skeleton cheerful, even decorously
playful, but I did not think smiling was a skeleton’s best hold.
“Yes, friend,” said the poor skeleton, “the facts are just as I have given
them to you. Two of these old graveyards—the one that I resided in and one
further along—have been deliberately neglected by our descendants of to-
day until there is no occupying them any longer. Aside from the
osteological discomfort of it—and that is no light matter this rainy weather
—the present state of things is ruinous to property. We have got to move or
be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly destroyed.
“Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there
isn’t a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance—now that is
an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box
mounted on an express-wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned,
silver-mounted burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black
plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots—I
mean folks like the Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such. They
are all about ruined. The most substantial people in our set, they were. And
now look at them—utterly used up and poverty-stricken. One of the
Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late barkeeper for some fresh
shavings to put under his head. I tell you it speaks volumes, for there is
nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument. He loves to read
the inscription. He comes after a while to believe what it says himself, and
then you may see him sitting on the fence night after night enjoying it.
Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is
dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were
used more. Now I don’t complain, but confidentially I do think it was a
little shabby in my descendants to give me nothing but this old slab of a

gravestone—and all the more that there isn’t a compliment on it. It used to
have:

GONE TO HIS JUST REWARD’

on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by and by I noticed that
whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the
railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that, and
then he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and
comfortable. So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools. But a dead man
always takes a deal of pride in his monument. Yonder goes half a dozen of
the Jarvises now, with the family monument along. And Smithers and some
hired specters went by with his awhile ago. Hello, Higgins, good-by, old
friend! That’s Meredith Higgins—died in ‘44—belongs to our set in the
cemetery—fine old family— great-grandmother was an Injun—I am on the
most familiar terms with him—he didn’t hear me was the reason he didn’t
answer me. And I am sorry, too, because I would have liked to introduce
you. You would admire him. He is the most disjointed, sway-backed, and
generally distorted old skeleton you ever saw, but he is full of fun. When he
laughs it sounds like rasping two stones together, and he always starts it off
with a cheery screech like raking a nail across a window-pane. Hey, Jones!
That is old Columbus Jones—shroud cost four hundred dollars—entire
trousseau, including monument, twenty-seven hundred. This was in the
spring of ‘26. It was enormous style for those days. Dead people came all
the way from the Alleghanies to see his things—the party that occupied the
grave next to mine remembers it well. Now do you see that individual going
along with a piece of a head-board under his arm, one leg-bone below his
knee gone, and not a thing in the world on? That is Barstow Dalhousie, and
next to Columbus Jones he was the most sumptuously outfitted person that
ever entered our cemetery. We are all leaving. We cannot tolerate the
treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendants. They open new
cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy. They mend the streets, but
they never mend anything that is about us or belongs to us. Look at that
coffin of mine—yet I tell you in its day it was a piece of furniture that
would have attracted attention in any drawing-room in this city. You may
have it if you want it—I can’t afford to repair it. Put a new bottom in her,
and part of a new top, and a bit of fresh lining along the left side, and you’ll

find her about as comfortable as any receptacle of her species you ever
tried. No thanks—no, don’t mention it— you have been civil to me, and I
would give you all the property I have got before I would seem ungrateful.
Now this winding-sheet is a kind of a sweet thing in its way, if you would
like to—No? Well, just as you say, but I wished to be fair and liberal—
there’s nothing mean about me. Good-by, friend, I must be going. I may
have a good way to go to-night—don’t know. I only know one thing for
certain, and that is that I am on the emigrant trail now, and I’ll never sleep
in that crazy old cemetery again. I will travel till I find respectable quarters,
if I have to hoof it to New Jersey. All the boys are going. It was decided in
public conclave, last night, to emigrate, and by the time the sun rises there
won’t be a bone left in our old habitations. Such cemeteries may suit my
surviving friends, but they do not suit the remains that have the honor to
make these remarks. My opinion is the general opinion. If you doubt it, go
and see how the departing ghosts upset things before they started. They
were almost riotous in their demonstrations of distaste. Hello, here are some
of the Bledsoes, and if you will give me a lift with this tombstone I guess I
will join company and jog along with them—mighty respectable old family,
the Bledsoes, and used to always come out in six-horse hearses and all that
sort of thing fifty years ago when I walked these streets in daylight. Good-
by, friend.”
And with his gravestone on his shoulder he joined the grisly procession,
dragging his damaged coffin after him, for notwithstanding he pressed it
upon me so earnestly, I utterly refused his hospitality. I suppose that for as
much as two hours these sad outcasts went clacking by, laden with their
dismal effects, and all that time I sat pitying them. One or two of the
youngest and least dilapidated among them inquired about midnight trains
on the railways, but the rest seemed unacquainted with that mode of travel,
and merely asked about common public roads to various towns and cities,
some of which are not on the map now, and vanished from it and from the
earth as much as thirty years ago, and some few of them never had existed
anywhere but on maps, and private ones in real-estate agencies at that. And
they asked about the condition of the cemeteries in these towns and cities,
and about the reputation the citizens bore as to reverence for the dead.
This whole matter interested me deeply, and likewise compelled my
sympathy for these homeless ones. And it all seeming real, and I not
knowing it was a dream, I mentioned to one shrouded wanderer an idea that

had entered my head to publish an account of this curious and very
sorrowful exodus, but said also that I could not describe it truthfully, and
just as it occurred, without seeming to trifle with a grave subject and exhibit
an irreverence for the dead that would shock and distress their surviving
friends. But this bland and stately remnant of a former citizen leaned him
far over my gate and whispered in my ear, and said:
“Do not let that disturb you. The community that can stand such
graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can
say about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them.”
At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished
and left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with
my head out of the bed and “sagging” downward considerably—a position
favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.
NOTE.—The reader is assured that if the cemeteries in his town are kept
in good order, this Dream is not leveled at his town at all, but is leveled
particularly and venomously at the next town.

A TRUE STORY
REPEATED WORD FOR WORD AS I HEARD IT—[Written
about 1876]

It was summer-time, and twilight. We were sitting on the porch of the
farmhouse, on the summit of the hill, and “Aunt Rachel” was sitting
respectfully below our level, on the steps—for she was our Servant, and
colored. She was of mighty frame and stature; she was sixty years old, but
her eye was undimmed and her strength unabated. She was a cheerful,

hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to laugh than it is for a bird
to sing. She was under fire now, as usual when the day was done. That is to
say, she was being chaffed without mercy, and was enjoying it. She would
let off peal after peal of laughter, and then sit with her face in her hands and
shake with throes of enjoyment which she could no longer get breath
enough to express. At such a moment as this a thought occurred to me, and I
said:
“Aunt Rachel, how is it that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any
trouble?”
She stopped quaking. She paused, and there was moment of silence. She
turned her face over her shoulder toward me, and said, without even a smile
her voice:
“Misto C——, is you in ’arnest?”
It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner and my speech,
too. I said:
“Why, I thought—that is, I meant—why, you can’t have had any trouble.
I’ve never heard you sigh, and never seen your eye when there wasn’t a
laugh in it.”
She faced fairly around now, and was full earnestness.
“Has I had any trouble? Misto C——-, I’s gwyne to tell you, den I leave
it to you. I was bawn down ’mongst de slaves; I knows all ’bout slavery,
’case I ben one of ’em my own se’f. Well sah, my ole man—dat’s my
husban’—he was lovin’ an’ kind to me, jist as kind as you is to yo’ own
wife. An’ we had chil’en—seven chil’en—an’ we loved dem chil’en jist de
same as you loves yo’ chil’en. Dey was black, but de Lord can’t make
chil’en so black but what dey mother loves ’em an’ wouldn’t give ’em up,
no, not for anything dat’s in dis whole world.
“Well, sah, I was raised in ole Fo’ginny, but my mother she was raised in
Maryland; an’ my souls she was turrible when she’d git started! My lan! but
she’d make de fur fly! When she’d git into dem tantrums, she always had
one word dat she said. She’d straighten herse’f up an’ put her fists in her
hips an’ say, ‘I want you to understan’ dat I wa’n’t bawn in the mash to be
fool’ by trash! I’s one o’ de ole Blue Hen’s Chickens, I is!’ Ca’se you see,
dat’s what folks dat’s bawn in Maryland calls deyselves, an’ dey’s proud of
it. Well, dat was her word. I don’t ever forgit it, beca’se she said it so much,

an’ beca’se she said it one day when my little Henry tore his wris’ awful,
and most busted ’is head, right up at de top of his forehead, an’ de niggers
didn’t fly aroun’ fas’ enough to tend to him. An’ when dey talk’ back at her,
she up an’ she says, Look-a-heah!’ she says, ‘I want you niggers to
understan’ dat I wa’n’t bawn in de mash be fool’ by trash! I’s one o’ de ole
Blue Hen’s chickens, I is!’ an’ den she clar’ dat kitchen an’ bandage’ up de
chile herse’f. So I says dat word, too, when I’s riled.
“Well, bymeby my ole mistis say she’s broke, an’ she got to sell all de
niggers on de place. An’ when I heah dat dey gwyne to sell us all off at
oction in Richmon’, oh, de good gracious! I know what dat mean!”
Aunt Rachel had gradually risen, while she warmed to her subject, and
now she towered above us, black against the stars.
“Dey put chains on us an’ put us on a stan’ as high as dis po’ch—twenty
foot high—an’ all de people stood aroun’, crowds an’ crowds. An’ dey’d
come up dah an’ look at us all roun’, an’ squeeze our arm, an’ make us git
up an’ walk, an’ den say, Dis one too ole,’ or ’Dis one lame,’ or Dis one
don’t ’mount to much.’ An’ dey sole my ole man, an’ took him away, an’
dey begin to sell my chil’en an’ take dem away, an’ I begin to cry; an’ de
man say, ’Shet up yo’ damn blubberin’,’ an’ hit me on de mouf wid his han’.
An’ when de las’ one was gone but my little Henry, I grab’ him clost up to
my breas’ so, an’ I ris up an’ says, ‘You sha’nt take him away,’ I says; ‘I’ll
kill de man dat tetches him!’ I says. But my little Henry whisper an’ say ‘I
gwyne to run away, an’ den I work an’ buy yo’ freedom.’ Oh, bless de chile,
he always so good! But dey got him—dey got him, de men did; but I took
and tear de clo’es mos’ off of ’em an’ beat ’em over de head wid my chain;
an’ dey give it to me too, but I didn’t mine dat.
“Well, dah was my ole man gone, an’ all my chil’en, all my seven chil’en
—an’ six of ’em I hain’t set eyes on ag’in to dis day, an’ dat’s twenty-two
year ago las’ Easter. De man dat bought me b’long’ in Newbern, an’ he took
me dah. Well, bymeby de years roll on an’ de waw come. My marster he
was a Confedrit colonel, an’ I was his family’s cook. So when de Unions
took dat town, dey all run away an’ lef’ me all by myse’f wid de other
niggers in dat mons’us big house. So de big Union officers move in dah, an’
dey ask me would I cook for dem. ‘Lord bless you,’ says I, ’dat what I’s
for.’

“Dey wa’n’t no small-fry officers, mine you, dey was de biggest dey is;
an’ de way dey made dem sojers mosey roun’! De Gen’l he tole me to boss
dat kitchen; an’ he say, ‘If anybody come meddlin’ wid you, you jist make
em walk chalk; don’t you be afeared,’ he say; ‘you’s ’mong frens now.’
“Well, I thinks to myse’f, if my little Henry ever got a chance to run
away, he’d make to de Norf, o’ course. So one day I comes in dah whar de
big officers was, in de parlor, an’ I drops a kurtchy, so, an’ I up an’ tole ’em
’bout my Henry, dey a-listenin’ to my troubles jist de same as if I was white
folks; an’ I says, ‘What I come for is beca’se if he got away and got up Norf
whar you gemmen comes from, you might ’a’ seen him, maybe, an’ could
tell me so as I could fine him ag’in; he was very little, an’ he had a sk-yar
on his lef’ wris’ an’ at de top of his forehead.’ Den dey look mournful, an’
de Gen’l says, ‘How long sence you los’ him?’ an’ I say, ‘Thirteen year.’
Den de Gen’l say, ‘He wouldn’t be little no mo’ now—he’s a man!’
“I never thought o’ dat befo’! He was only dat little feller to me yit. I
never thought ’bout him growin’ up an’ bein’ big. But I see it den. None o’
de gemmen had run acrost him, so dey couldn’t do nothin’ for me. But all
dat time, do’ I didn’t know it, my Henry was run off to de Norf, years an’
years, an’ he was a barber, too, an’ worked for hisse’f. An’ bymeby, when de
waw come he ups an’ he says: ‘I’s done barberin’,’ he says, ‘I’s gwyne to
fine my ole mammy, less’n she’s dead.’ So he sole out an’ went to whar dey
was recruitin’, an’ hired hisse’f out to de colonel for his servant; an’ den he
went all froo de battles everywhah, huntin’ for his ole mammy; yes,
indeedy, he’d hire to fust one officer an’ den another, tell he’d ransacked de
whole Souf; but you see I didn’t know nuffin bout dis. How was I gwyne to
know it?
“Well, one night we had a big sojer ball; de sojers dah at Newbern was
always havin’ balls an’ carryin’ on. Dey had ’em in my kitchen, heaps o’
times, ’ca’se it was so big. Mine you, I was down on sich doin’s; beca’se
my place was wid de officers, an’ it rasp me to have dem common sojers
cavortin’ roun’ in my kitchen like dat. But I alway’ stood aroun’ an kep’
things straight, I did; an’ sometimes dey’d git my dander up, an’ den I’d
make ’em clar dat kitchen, mine I TELL you!
“Well, one night—it was a Friday night—dey comes a whole platoon f’m
a nigger ridgment da was on guard at de house—de house was head
quarters, you know-an’ den I was jist a-bilin’ mad? I was jist a-boomin’! I

swelled aroun’, an swelled aroun’; I jist was a-itchin’ for em to do somefin
for to start me. An’ dey was a-waltzin’ an a dancin’! my but dey was havin’
a time! an I jist a-swellin’ an’ a-swellin’ up! Pooty soon, ’long comes sich a
spruce young nigger a-sailin’ down de room wid a yaller wench roun’ de
wais’; an’ roun an’ roun’ an roun’ dey went, enough to make a body drunk
to look at ’em; an’ when dey got abreas’ o’ me, dey went to kin’ o’ balancin’
aroun’ fust on one leg an’ den on t’other, an’ smilin’ at my big red turban,
an’ makin’ fun, an’ I ups an’ says ’Git along wid you!—rubbage!’

De young man’s face kin’ o’ changed, all of a sudden, for ’bout a second,
but den he went to smilin’ ag’in, same as he was befo’. Well, ’bout dis time,
in comes some niggers dat played music and b’long’ to de ban’, an’ dey

never could git along widout puttin’ on airs. An’ de very fust air dey put on
dat night, I lit into em! Dey laughed, an’ dat made me wuss. De res’ o’ de
niggers got to laughin’, an’ den my soul alive but I was hot! My eye was jist
a-blazin’! I jist straightened myself up so—jist as I is now, plum to de
ceilin’, mos’—an’ I digs my fists into my hips, an’ I says, ‘Look-a-heah!’ I
says, ‘I want you niggers to understan’ dat I wa’n’t bawn in de mash to be
fool’ by trash! I’s one o’ de ole Blue hen’s Chickens, I is!’—an’ den I see
dat young man stan’ a-starin’ an’ stiff, lookin’ kin’ o’ up at de ceilin’ like he
fo’got somefin, an’ couldn’t ’member it no mo’. Well, I jist march’ on dem
niggers—so, lookin’ like a gen’l—an’ dey jist cave’ away befo’ me an’ out
at de do’. An’ as dis young man a-goin’ out, I heah him say to another
nigger, Jim,’ he says, ‘you go ’long an’ tell de cap’n I be on han’ ’bout eight
o’clock in de mawnin’; dey’s somefin on my mine,’ he says; ‘I don’t sleep
no mo’ dis night. You go ’long,’ he says, ‘an’ leave me by my own se’f.’
“Dis was ’bout one o’clock in de mawnin’. Well, ’bout seven, I was up
an’ on han’, gittin’ de officers’ breakfast. I was a-stoopin’ down by de stove
—jist so, same as if yo’ foot was de stove—an’ I’d opened de stove do’ wid
my right han’—so, pushin’ it back, jist as I pushes yo’ foot—an’ I’d jist got
de pan o’ hot biscuits in my han’ an’ was ’bout to raise up, when I see a
black face come aroun’ under mine, an’ de eyes a-lookin’ up into mine, jist
as I’s a-lookin’ up clost under yo’ face now; an’ I jist stopped right dah, an’
never budged! jist gazed an’ gazed so; an’ de pan begin to tremble, an’ all of
a sudden I knowed! De pan drop’ on de flo’ an’ I grab his lef’ han’ an’ shove
back his sleeve—jist so, as I’s doin’ to you—an’ den I goes for his forehead
an’ push de hair back so, an’ ‘Boy!’ I says, ‘if you an’t my Henry, what is
you doin’ wid dis welt on yo’ wris’ an’ dat sk-yar on yo’ forehead? De Lord
God ob heaven be praise’, I got my own ag’in!’
“Oh no’ Misto C———, I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!”

THE SIAMESE TWINS
[Written about 1868.]

I do not wish to write of the personal habits of these strange creatures
solely, but also of certain curious details of various kinds concerning them,
which, belonging only to their private life, have never crept into print.
Knowing the Twins intimately, I feel that I am peculiarly well qualified for
the task I have taken upon myself.
The Siamese Twins are naturally tender and affectionate in disposition,
and have clung to each other with singular fidelity throughout a long and
eventful life. Even as children they were inseparable companions; and it
was noticed that they always seemed to prefer each other’s society to that of
any other persons. They nearly always played together; and, so accustomed
was their mother to this peculiarity, that, whenever both of them chanced to
be lost, she usually only hunted for one of them—satisfied that when she

found that one she would find his brother somewhere in the immediate
neighborhood. And yet these creatures were ignorant and unlettered—
barbarians themselves and the offspring of barbarians, who knew not the
light of philosophy and science. What a withering rebuke is this to our
boasted civilization, with its quarrelings, its wranglings, and its separations
of brothers!
As men, the Twins have not always lived in perfect accord; but still there
has always been a bond between them which made them unwilling to go
away from each other and dwell apart. They have even occupied the same
house, as a general thing, and it is believed that they have never failed to
even sleep together on any night since they were born. How surely do the
habits of a lifetime become second nature to us! The Twins always go to
bed at the same time; but Chang usually gets up about an hour before his
brother. By an understanding between themselves, Chang does all the
indoor work and Eng runs all the errands. This is because Eng likes to go
out; Chang’s habits are sedentary. However, Chang always goes along. Eng
is a Baptist, but Chang is a Roman Catholic; still, to please his brother,
Chang consented to be baptized at the same time that Eng was, on condition
that it should not “count.” During the war they were strong partisans, and
both fought gallantly all through the great struggle—Eng on the Union side
and Chang on the Confederate. They took each other prisoners at Seven
Oaks, but the proofs of capture were so evenly balanced in favor of each,
that a general army court had to be assembled to determine which one was
properly the captor and which the captive. The jury was unable to agree for
a long time; but the vexed question was finally decided by agreeing to
consider them both prisoners, and then exchanging them. At one time
Chang was convicted of disobedience of orders, and sentenced to ten days
in the guard-house, but Eng, in spite of all arguments, felt obliged to share
his imprisonment, notwithstanding he himself was entirely innocent; and so,
to save the blameless brother from suffering, they had to discharge both
from custody—the just reward of faithfulness.
Upon one occasion the brothers fell out about something, and Chang
knocked Eng down, and then tripped and fell on him, whereupon both
clinched and began to beat and gouge each other without mercy. The
bystanders interfered, and tried to separate them, but they could not do it,
and so allowed them to fight it out. In the end both were disabled, and were
carried to the hospital on one and the same shutter.

Their ancient habit of going always together had its drawbacks when they
reached man’s estate, and entered upon the luxury of courting. Both fell in
love with the same girl. Each tried to steal clandestine interviews with her,
but at the critical moment the other would always turn up. By and by Eng
saw, with distraction, that Chang had won the girl’s affections; and, from
that day forth, he had to bear with the agony of being a witness to all their
dainty billing and cooing. But with a magnanimity that did him infinite
credit, he succumbed to his fate, and gave countenance and encouragement
to a state of things that bade fair to sunder his generous heart-strings. He sat
from seven every evening until two in the morning, listening to the fond
foolishness of the two lovers, and to the concussion of hundreds of
squandered kisses—for the privilege of sharing only one of which he would
have given his right hand. But he sat patiently, and waited, and gaped, and
yawned, and stretched, and longed for two o’clock to come. And he took
long walks with the lovers on moonlight evenings—sometimes traversing
ten miles, notwithstanding he was usually suffering from rheumatism. He is
an inveterate smoker; but he could not smoke on these occasions, because
the young lady was painfully sensitive to the smell of tobacco. Eng
cordially wanted them married, and done with it; but although Chang often
asked the momentous question, the young lady could not gather sufficient
courage to answer it while Eng was by. However, on one occasion, after
having walked some sixteen miles, and sat up till nearly daylight, Eng
dropped asleep, from sheer exhaustion, and then the question was asked and
answered. The lovers were married. All acquainted with the circumstance
applauded the noble brother-in-law. His unwavering faithfulness was the
theme of every tongue. He had stayed by them all through their long and
arduous courtship; and when at last they were married, he lifted his hands
above their heads, and said with impressive unction, “Bless ye, my children,
I will never desert ye!” and he kept his word. Fidelity like this is all too rare
in this cold world.
By and by Eng fell in love with his sister-in-law’s sister, and married her,
and since that day they have all lived together, night and day, in an
exceeding sociability which is touching and beautiful to behold, and is a
scathing rebuke to our boasted civilization.
The sympathy existing between these two brothers is so close and so
refined that the feelings, the impulses, the emotions of the one are instantly
experienced by the other. When one is sick, the other is sick; when one feels

pain, the other feels it; when one is angered, the other’s temper takes fire.
We have already seen with what happy facility they both fell in love with
the same girl. Now Chang is bitterly opposed to all forms of intemperance,
on principle; but Eng is the reverse—for, while these men’s feelings and
emotions are so closely wedded, their reasoning faculties are unfettered;
their thoughts are free. Chang belongs to the Good Templars, and is a hard-
working, enthusiastic supporter of all temperance reforms. But, to his bitter
distress, every now and then Eng gets drunk, and, of course, that makes
Chang drunk too. This unfortunate thing has been a great sorrow to Chang,
for it almost destroys his usefulness in his favorite field of effort. As sure as
he is to head a great temperance procession Eng ranges up alongside of
him, prompt to the minute, and drunk as a lord; but yet no more dismally
and hopelessly drunk than his brother, who has not tasted a drop. And so the
two begin to hoot and yell, and throw mud and bricks at the Good
Templars; and, of course, they break up the procession. It would be
manifestly wrong to punish Chang for what Eng does, and, therefore, the
Good Templars accept the untoward situation, and suffer in silence and
sorrow. They have officially and deliberately examined into the matter, and
find Chang blameless. They have taken the two brothers and filled Chang
full of warm water and sugar and Eng full of whisky, and in twenty-five
minutes it was not possible to tell which was the drunkest. Both were as
drunk as loons—and on hot whisky punches, by the smell of their breath.
Yet all the while Chang’s moral principles were unsullied, his conscience
clear; and so all just men were forced to confess that he was not morally,
but only physically, drunk. By every right and by every moral evidence the
man was strictly sober; and, therefore, it caused his friends all the more
anguish to see him shake hands with the pump and try to wind his watch
with his night-key.
There is a moral in these solemn warnings—or, at least, a warning in
these solemn morals; one or the other. No matter, it is somehow. Let us heed
it; let us profit by it.
I could say more of an instructive nature about these interesting beings,
but let what I have written suffice.
Having forgotten to mention it sooner, I will remark in conclusion that
the ages of the Siamese Twins are respectively fifty-one and fifty-three
years.

SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN
LONDON
[Written about 1872.]

At the anniversary festival of the Scottish Corporation of London on
Monday evening, in response to the toast of “The Ladies,” MARK TWAIN
replied. The following is his speech as reported in the London Observer:
I am proud, indeed, of the distinction of being chosen to respond to this
especial toast, to ‘The Ladies,’ or to women if you please, for that is the
preferable term, perhaps; it is certainly the older, and therefore the more
entitled to reverence [Laughter.] I have noticed that the Bible, with that
plain, blunt honesty which is such a conspicuous characteristic of the
Scriptures, is always particular to never refer to even the illustrious mother
of all mankind herself as a ‘lady,’ but speaks of her as a woman. [Laughter.]
It is odd, but you will find it is so. I am peculiarly proud of this honor,
because I think that the toast to women is one which, by right and by every
rule of gallantry, should take precedence of all others—of the army, of the
navy, of even royalty itself—perhaps, though the latter is not necessary in
this day and in this land, for the reason that, tacitly, you do drink a broad
general health to all good women when you drink the health of the Queen
of England and the Princess of Wales. [Loud cheers.] I have in mind a poem
just now which is familiar to you all, familiar to everybody. And what an
inspiration that was (and how instantly the present toast recalls the verses to
all our minds) when the most noble, the most gracious, the purest, and
sweetest of all poets says:
“Woman! O woman!—er— Wom—”
[Laughter.] However, you remember the lines; and you remember how
feelingly, how daintily, how almost imperceptibly the verses raise up before
you, feature by feature, the ideal of a true and perfect woman; and how, as
you contemplate the finished marvel, your homage grows into worship of
the intellect that could create so fair a thing out of mere breath, mere words.

And you call to mind now, as I speak, how the poet, with stern fidelity to
the history of all humanity, delivers this beautiful child of his heart and his
brain over to the trials and sorrows that must come to all, sooner or later,
that abide in the earth, and how the pathetic story culminates in that
apostrophe—so wild, so regretful, so full of mournful retrospection. The
lines run thus:
“Alas!—alas!—a—alas! ——Alas!————alas!”
—and so on. [Laughter.] I do not remember the rest; but, taken together,
it seems to me that poem is the noblest tribute to woman that human genius
has ever brought forth—[laughter]—and I feel that if I were to talk hours I
could not do my great theme completer or more graceful justice than I have
now done in simply quoting that poet’s matchless words. [Renewed
laughter.] The phases of the womanly nature are infinite in their variety.
Take any type of woman, and you shall find in it something to respect,
something to admire, something to love. And you shall find the whole
joining you heart and hand. Who was more patriotic than Joan of Arc? Who
was braver? Who has given us a grander instance of self-sacrificing
devotion? Ah! you remember, you remember well, what a throb of pain,
what a great tidal wave of grief swept over us all when Joan of Arc fell at
Waterloo. [Much laughter.] Who does not sorrow for the loss of Sappho, the
sweet singer of Israel? [Laughter.] Who among us does not miss the gentle
ministrations, the softening influences, the humble piety of Lucretia
Borgia? [Laughter.] Who can join in the heartless libel that says woman is
extravagant in dress when he can look back and call to mind our simple and
lowly mother Eve arrayed in her modification of the Highland costume.
[Roars of laughter.] Sir, women have been soldiers, women have been
painters, women have been poets. As long as language lives the name of
Cleopatra will live.
And, not because she conquered George III.—[laughter]—but because
she wrote those divine lines:
“Let dogs delight to bark and bite, For God hath made them so.”
[More laughter.] The story of the world is adorned with the names of
illustrious ones of our own sex—some of them sons of St. Andrew, too—
Scott, Bruce, Burns, the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis—[laughter]—the
gifted Ben Lomond, and the great new Scotchman, Ben Disraeli.* [Great
laughter.] Out of the great plains of history tower whole mountain ranges of

sublime women—the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Semiramis, Sairey Gamp;
the list is endless—[laughter]—but I will not call the mighty roll, the names
rise up in your own memories at the mere suggestion, luminous with the
glory of deeds that cannot die, hallowed by the loving worship of the good
and the true of all epochs and all climes. [Cheers.] Suffice it for our pride
and our honor that we in our day have added to it such names as those of
Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale. [Cheers.] Woman is all that she
should be—gentle, patient, long suffering, trustful, unselfish, full of
generous impulses. It is her blessed mission to comfort the sorrowing, plead
for the erring, encourage the faint of purpose, succor the distressed, uplift
the fallen, befriend the friendless—in a word, afford the healing of her
sympathies and a home in her heart for all the bruised and persecuted
children of misfortune that knock at its hospitable door. [Cheers.] And when
I say, God bless her, there is none among us who has known the ennobling
affection of a wife, or the steadfast devotion of a mother, but in his heart
will say, Amen! [Loud and prolonged cheering.]

—[* Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, at that time Prime Minister of
England, had just been elected Lord Rector of Glasgow
University, and had made a speech which gave rise to a
world of discussion.]

A GHOST STORY

I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper
stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came. The place had
long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed
groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first
night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a
superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the
stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my face and
clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.

I was glad enough when I reached my room and locked out the mold and
the darkness. A cheery fire was burning in the grate, and I sat down before it
with a comforting sense of relief. For two hours I sat there, thinking of
bygone times; recalling old scenes, and summoning half-forgotten faces out
of the mists of the past; listening, in fancy, to voices that long ago grew
silent for all time, and to once familiar songs that nobody sings now. And as
my reverie softened down to a sadder and sadder pathos, the shrieking of
the winds outside softened to a wail, the angry beating of the rain against
the panes diminished to a tranquil patter, and one by one the noises in the
street subsided, until the hurrying footsteps of the last belated straggler died
away in the distance and left no sound behind.
The fire had burned low. A sense of loneliness crept over me. I arose and
undressed, moving on tiptoe about the room, doing stealthily what I had to
do, as if I were environed by sleeping enemies whose slumbers it would be
fatal to break. I covered up in bed, and lay listening to the rain and wind
and the faint creaking of distant shutters, till they lulled me to sleep.
I slept profoundly, but how long I do not know. All at once I found
myself awake, and filled with a shuddering expectancy. All was still. All but
my own heart—I could hear it beat. Presently the bedclothes began to slip
away slowly toward the foot of the bed, as if some one were pulling them! I
could not stir; I could not speak. Still the blankets slipped deliberately
away, till my breast was uncovered. Then with a great effort I seized them
and drew them over my head. I waited, listened, waited. Once more that
steady pull began, and once more I lay torpid a century of dragging seconds
till my breast was naked again. At last I roused my energies and snatched
the covers back to their place and held them with a strong grip. I waited. By
and by I felt a faint tug, and took a fresh grip. The tug strengthened to a
steady strain—it grew stronger and stronger. My hold parted, and for the
third time the blankets slid away. I groaned. An answering groan came from
the foot of the bed! Beaded drops of sweat stood upon my forehead. I was
more dead than alive. Presently I heard a heavy footstep in my room—the
step of an elephant, it seemed to me—it was not like anything human. But it
was moving from me—there was relief in that. I heard it approach the door
—pass out without moving bolt or lock—and wander away among the
dismal corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it
passed—and then silence reigned once more.

When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself, “This is a dream—
simply a hideous dream.” And so I lay thinking it over until I convinced
myself that it was a dream, and then a comforting laugh relaxed my lips and
I was happy again. I got up and struck a light; and when I found that the
locks and bolts were just as I had left them, another soothing laugh welled
in my heart and rippled from my lips. I took my pipe and lit it, and was just
sitting down before the fire, when—down went the pipe out of my nerveless
fingers, the blood forsook my cheeks, and my placid breathing was cut
short with a gasp! In the ashes on the hearth, side by side with my own bare
footprint, was another, so vast that in comparison mine was but an infant’s!
Then I had had a visitor, and the elephant tread was explained.
I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear. I lay a long time,
peering into the darkness, and listening.—Then I heard a grating noise
overhead, like the dragging of a heavy body across the floor; then the
throwing down of the body, and the shaking of my windows in response to
the concussion. In distant parts of the building I heard the muffled
slamming of doors. I heard, at intervals, stealthy footsteps creeping in and
out among the corridors, and up and down the stairs. Sometimes these
noises approached my door, hesitated, and went away again. I heard the
clanking of chains faintly, in remote passages, and listened while the
clanking grew nearer—while it wearily climbed the stairways, marking
each move by the loose surplus of chain that fell with an accented rattle
upon each succeeding step as the goblin that bore it advanced. I heard
muttered sentences; half-uttered screams that seemed smothered violently;
and the swish of invisible garments, the rush of invisible wings. Then I
became conscious that my chamber was invaded—that I was not alone. I
heard sighs and breathings about my bed, and mysterious whisperings.
Three little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceiling
directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment, and then dropped
—two of them upon my face and one upon the pillow. They spattered,
liquidly, and felt warm. Intuition told me they had turned to gouts of blood
as they fell—I needed no light to satisfy myself of that. Then I saw pallid
faces, dimly luminous, and white uplifted hands, floating bodiless in the air
—floating a moment and then disappearing. The whispering ceased, and the
voices and the sounds, and a solemn stillness followed. I waited and
listened. I felt that I must have light or die. I was weak with fear. I slowly
raised myself toward a sitting posture, and my face came in contact with a

clammy hand! All strength went from me apparently, and I fell back like a
stricken invalid. Then I heard the rustle of a garment—it seemed to pass to
the door and go out.
When everything was still once more, I crept out of bed, sick and feeble,
and lit the gas with a hand that trembled as if it were aged with a hundred
years. The light brought some little cheer to my spirits. I sat down and fell
into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the ashes. By and by
its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up and the broad gas-
flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I heard that
elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and nearer, along the
musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned. The tread reached my
very door and paused—the light had dwindled to a sickly blue, and all
things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The door did not open, and yet I
felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and presently was conscious of a huge,
cloudy presence before me. I watched it with fascinated eyes. A pale glow
stole over the Thing; gradually its cloudy folds took shape—an arm
appeared, then legs, then a body, and last a great sad face looked out of the
vapor. Stripped of its filmy housings, naked, muscular and comely, the
majestic Cardiff Giant loomed above me!
All my misery vanished—for a child might know that no harm could
come with that benignant countenance. My cheerful spirits returned at once,
and in sympathy with them the gas flamed up brightly again. Never a lonely
outcast was so glad to welcome company as I was to greet the friendly
giant. I said:
“Why, is it nobody but you? Do you know, I have been scared to death
for the last two or three hours? I am most honestly glad to see you. I wish I
had a chair—Here, here, don’t try to sit down in that thing—”
But it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him and down he
went—I never saw a chair shivered so in my life.
“Stop, stop, you’ll ruin ev—”
Too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved
into its original elements.
“Confound it, haven’t you got any judgment at all? Do you want to ruin
all the furniture on the place? Here, here, you petrified fool—”

But it was no use. Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed,
and it was a melancholy ruin.
“Now what sort of a way is that to do? First you come lumbering about
the place bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry me
to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume which would
not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people except in a respectable
theater, and not even there if the nudity were of your sex, you repay me by
wrecking all the furniture you can find to sit down on. And why will you?
You damage yourself as much as you do me. You have broken off the end of
your spinal column, and littered up the floor with chips of your hams till the
place looks like a marble yard. You ought to be ashamed of yourself—you
are big enough to know better.”
“Well, I will not break any more furniture. But what am I to do? I have
not had a chance to sit down for a century.” And the tears came into his
eyes.
“Poor devil,” I said, “I should not have been so harsh with you. And you
are an orphan, too, no doubt. But sit down on the floor here—nothing else
can stand your weight—and besides, we cannot be sociable with you away
up there above me; I want you down where I can perch on this high
counting-house stool and gossip with you face to face.”

So he sat down on the floor, and lit a pipe which I gave him, threw one of
my red blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sitz-bath on his head,
helmet fashion, and made himself picturesque and comfortable. Then he
crossed his ankles, while I renewed the fire, and exposed the flat,
honeycombed bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth.
“What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your
legs, that they are gouged up so?”
“Infernal chilblains—I caught them clear up to the back of my head,
roosting out there under Newell’s farm. But I love the place; I love it as one
loves his old home. There is no peace for me like the peace I feel when I am
there.”
We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired,
and spoke of it.
“Tired?” he said. “Well, I should think so. And now I will tell you all
about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the Petrified

Man that lies across the street there in the museum. I am the ghost of the
Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor
body burial again. Now what was the most natural thing for me to do, to
make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it!— haunt the place where
the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other
spirits to help me. But it did no good, for nobody ever came to the museum
at midnight. Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this
place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the
most efficient company that perdition could furnish. Night after night we
have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains,
groaning, whispering, tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth,
I am almost worn out. But when I saw a light in your room to-night I roused
my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am
tired out—entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some
hope!”
I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:
“This transcends everything! everything that ever did occur! Why you
poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing—you
have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself—the real Cardiff Giant is in
Albany!—[A fact. The original fraud was ingeniously and fraudfully
duplicated, and exhibited in New York as the “only genuine” Cardiff Giant
(to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real colossus) at the very
same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a museum in Albany,]—
Confound it, don’t you know your own remains?”
I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation,
overspread a countenance before.
The Petrified Man rose slowly to his feet, and said:
“Honestly, is that true?”
“As true as I am sitting here.”
He took the pipe from his mouth and laid it on the mantel, then stood
irresolute a moment (unconsciously, from old habit, thrusting his hands
where his pantaloons pockets should have been, and meditatively dropping
his chin on his breast) and finally said:
“Well—I never felt so absurd before. The Petrified Man has sold
everybody else, and now the mean fraud has ended by selling its own ghost!

My son, if there is any charity left in your heart for a poor friendless
phantom like me, don’t let this get out. Think how you would feel if you
had made such an ass of yourself.”
I heard his stately tramp die away, step by step down the stairs and out
into the deserted street, and felt sorry that he was gone, poor fellow—and
sorrier still that he had carried off my red blanket and my bath-tub.

THE CAPITOLINE VENUS

CHAPTER I.

[Scene-An Artist’s Studio in Rome.]
“Oh, George, I do love you!”

“Bless your dear heart, Mary, I know that—why is your father so
obdurate?”
“George, he means well, but art is folly to him—he only understands
groceries. He thinks you would starve me.”
“Confound his wisdom—it savors of inspiration. Why am I not a money-
making bowelless grocer, instead of a divinely gifted sculptor with nothing
to eat?”
“Do not despond, Georgy, dear—all his prejudices will fade away as
soon as you shall have acquired fifty thousand dol—”
“Fifty thousand demons! Child, I am in arrears for my board!”

CHAPTER II.

[Scene-A Dwelling in Rome.]
“My dear sir, it is useless to talk. I haven’t anything against you, but I
can’t let my daughter marry a hash of love, art, and starvation—I believe
you have nothing else to offer.”
“Sir, I am poor, I grant you. But is fame nothing? The Hon. Bellamy
Foodle of Arkansas says that my new statue of America is a clever piece of
sculpture, and he is satisfied that my name will one day be famous.”
“Bosh! What does that Arkansas ass know about it? Fame’s nothing—the
market price of your marble scarecrow is the thing to look at. It took you
six months to chisel it, and you can’t sell it for a hundred dollars. No, sir!
Show me fifty thousand dollars and you can have my daughter—otherwise
she marries young Simper. You have just six months to raise the money in.
Good morning, sir.”
“Alas! Woe is me!”

CHAPTER III.

[ Scene-The Studio.]
“Oh, John, friend of my boyhood, I am the unhappiest of men.”
“You’re a simpleton!”
“I have nothing left to love but my poor statue of America—and see,
even she has no sympathy for me in her cold marble countenance—so
beautiful and so heartless!”
“You’re a dummy!”
“Oh, John!”
“Oh, fudge! Didn’t you say you had six months to raise the money in?”
“Don’t deride my agony, John. If I had six centuries what good would it
do? How could it help a poor wretch without name, capital, or friends?”
“Idiot! Coward! Baby! Six months to raise the money in—and five will
do!”
“Are you insane?”
“Six months—an abundance. Leave it to me. I’ll raise it.”
“What do you mean, John? How on earth can you raise such a monstrous
sum for me?”
“Will you let that be my business, and not meddle? Will you leave the
thing in my hands? Will you swear to submit to whatever I do? Will you
pledge me to find no fault with my actions?”
“I am dizzy—bewildered—but I swear.”
John took up a hammer and deliberately smashed the nose of America!
He made another pass and two of her fingers fell to the floor—another, and
part of an ear came away—another, and a row of toes was mangled and
dismembered—another, and the left leg, from the knee down, lay a
fragmentary ruin!

John put on his hat and departed.
George gazed speechless upon the battered and grotesque nightmare
before him for the space of thirty seconds, and then wilted to the floor and
went into convulsions.
John returned presently with a carriage, got the broken-hearted artist and
the broken-legged statue aboard, and drove off, whistling low and
tranquilly.
He left the artist at his lodgings, and drove off and disappeared down the
Via Quirinalis with the statue.

CHAPTER IV.

[Scene—The Studio.]
“The six months will be up at two o’clock to-day! Oh, agony! My life is
blighted. I would that I were dead. I had no supper yesterday. I have had no
breakfast to-day. I dare not enter an eating-house. And hungry? —don’t

mention it! My bootmaker duns me to death—my tailor duns me—my
landlord haunts me. I am miserable. I haven’t seen John since that awful
day. She smiles on me tenderly when we meet in the great thoroughfares,
but her old flint of a father makes her look in the other direction in short
order. Now who is knocking at that door? Who is come to persecute me?
That malignant villain the bootmaker, I’ll warrant. Come in!”
“Ah, happiness attend your highness—Heaven be propitious to your
grace! I have brought my lord’s new boots—ah, say nothing about the pay,
there is no hurry, none in the world. Shall be proud if my noble lord will
continue to honor me with his custom—ah, adieu!”
“Brought the boots himself! Don’t want his pay! Takes his leave with a
bow and a scrape fit to honor majesty withal! Desires a continuance of my
custom! Is the world coming to an end? Of all the—come in!”
“Pardon, signore, but I have brought your new suit of clothes for—”
“Come in!”
“A thousand pardons for this intrusion, your worship. But I have prepared
the beautiful suite of rooms below for you—this wretched den is but ill
suited to—”
“Come in!”
“I have called to say that your credit at our bank, some time since
unfortunately interrupted, is entirely and most satisfactorily restored, and
we shall be most happy if you will draw upon us for any—”
“COME IN!”
“My noble boy, she is yours! She’ll be here in a moment! Take her—
marry her—love her—be happy!—God bless you both! Hip, hip, hur—”
“COME IN!!!!!”
“Oh, George, my own darling, we are saved!”
“Oh, Mary, my own darling, we are saved—but I’ll swear I don’t know
why nor how!”

CHAPTER V.

[Scene-A Roman Cafe.]
One of a group of American gentlemen reads and translates from the
weekly edition of ‘Il Slangwhanger di Roma’ as follows:

WONDERFUL DISCOVERY—Some six months ago Signor
John Smitthe, an American gentleman now some years a
resident of Rome, purchased for a trifle a small piece of
ground in the Campagna, just beyond the tomb of the Scipio
family, from the owner, a bankrupt relative of the Princess
Borghese. Mr. Smitthe afterward went to the Minister of the
Public Records and had the piece of ground transferred to a
poor American artist named George Arnold, explaining that
he did it as payment and satisfaction for pecuniary damage
accidentally done by him long since upon property
belonging to Signor Arnold, and further observed that he
would make additional satisfaction by improving the ground
for Signor A., at his own charge and cost. Four weeks ago,
while making some necessary excavations upon the property,
Signor Smitthe unearthed the most remarkable ancient
statue that has ever been added to the opulent art treasures
of Rome. It was an exquisite figure of a woman, and though
sadly stained by the soil and the mold of ages, no eye can
look unmoved upon its ravishing beauty. The nose, the left
leg from the knee down, an ear, and also the toes of the right
foot and two fingers of one of the hands were gone, but
otherwise the noble figure was in a remarkable state of
preservation. The government at once took military
possession of the statue, and appointed a commission of art-
critics, antiquaries, and cardinal princes of the church to
assess its value and determine the remuneration that must
go to the owner of the ground in which it was found. The
whole affair was kept a profound secret until last night. In
the mean time the commission sat with closed doors and
deliberated. Last night they decided unanimously that the
statue is a Venus, and the work of some unknown but

sublimely gifted artist of the third century before Christ.
They consider it the most faultless work of art the world has
any knowledge of.

At midnight they held a final conference and decided that the
Venus was worth the enormous sum of ten million francs! In
accordance with Roman law and Roman usage, the
government being half-owner in all works of art found in the
Campagna, the State has naught to do but pay five million
francs to Mr. Arnold and take permanent possession of the
beautiful statue. This morning the Venus will be removed to
the Capitol, there to remain, and at noon the commission
will wait upon Signor Arnold with His Holiness the Pope’s
order upon the Treasury for the princely sum of five million
francs in gold!

Chorus of Voices.—“Luck! It’s no name for it!”
Another Voice.—“Gentlemen, I propose that we immediately form an
American joint-stock company for the purchase of lands and excavations of
statues here, with proper connections in Wall Street to bull and bear the
stock.”
All.—“Agreed.”

CHAPTER VI.

[Scene—The Roman Capitol Ten Years Later.]
“Dearest Mary, this is the most celebrated statue in the world. This is the
renowned ‘Capitoline Venus’ you’ve heard so much about. Here she is with
her little blemishes ‘restored’ (that is, patched) by the most noted Roman
artists—and the mere fact that they did the humble patching of so noble a
creation will make their names illustrious while the world stands. How
strange it seems—this place! The day before I last stood here, ten happy
years ago, I wasn’t a rich man bless your soul, I hadn’t a cent. And yet I had

a good deal to do with making Rome mistress of this grandest work of
ancient art the world contains.”

“The worshiped, the illustrious Capitoline Venus—and what a sum she is
valued at! Ten millions of francs!”
“Yes—now she is.”
“And oh, Georgy, how divinely beautiful she is!”
“Ah, yes but nothing to what she was before that blessed John Smith
broke her leg and battered her nose. Ingenious Smith!—gifted Smith!—
noble Smith! Author of all our bliss! Hark! Do you know what that wheeze
means? Mary, that cub has got the whooping-cough. Will you never learn to
take care of the children!”
THE END

The Capitoline Venus is still in the Capitol at Rome, and is still the most
charming and most illustrious work of ancient art the world can boast of.
But if ever it shall be your fortune to stand before it and go into the
customary ecstasies over it, don’t permit this true and secret history of its

origin to mar your bliss—and when you read about a gigantic Petrified man
being dug up near Syracuse, in the State of New York, or near any other
place, keep your own counsel—and if the Barnum that buried him there
offers to sell to you at an enormous sum, don’t you buy. Send him to the
Pope!

[NOTE.—The above sketch was written at the time the
famous swindle of the “Petrified Giant” was the sensation of
the day in the United States]

SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE
DELIVERED IN HARTFORD, AT A DINNER TO
CORNELIUS WALFORD, OF LONDON

GENTLEMEN: I am glad, indeed, to assist in welcoming the
distinguished guest of this occasion to a city whose fame as an insurance
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band of brothers working sweetly hand in hand—the Colt’s Arms Company
making the destruction of our race easy and convenient, our life insurance
citizens paying for the victims when they pass away, Mr. Batterson
perpetuating their memory with his stately monuments, and our fire-
insurance comrades taking care of their hereafter. I am glad to assist in
welcoming our guest—first, because he is an Englishman, and I owe a
heavy debt of hospitality to certain of his fellow-countrymen; and secondly,
because he is in sympathy with insurance and has been the means of
making many other men cast their sympathies in the same direction.
Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance line
of business—especially accident insurance. Ever since I have been a
director in an accident-insurance company I have felt that I am a better
man. Life has seemed more precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier
aspect. Distressing special providences have lost half their horror. I look
upon a cripple now with affectionate interest—as an advertisement. I do not
seem to care for poetry any more. I do not care for politics—even
agriculture does not excite me. But to me now there is a charm about a
railway collision that is unspeakable.
There is nothing more beneficent than accident insurance. I have seen an
entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon of a
broken leg. I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in their
eyes, to bless this beneficent institution. In all my experience of life, I have
seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a freshly mutilated
man’s face when he feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and

finds his accident ticket all right. And I have seen nothing so sad as the look
that came into another splintered customer’s face when he found he
couldn’t collect on a wooden leg.
I will remark here, by way of advertisement, that that noble charity which
we have named the HARTFORD ACCIDENT INSURANCE COMPANY
—[The speaker is a director of the company named.]—is an institution
which is peculiarly to be depended upon. A man is bound to prosper who
gives it his custom.
No man can take out a policy in it and not get crippled before the year is
out. Now there was one indigent man who had been disappointed so often
with other companies that he had grown disheartened, his appetite left him,
he ceased to smile—life was but a weariness. Three weeks ago I got him to
insure with us, and now he is the brightest, happiest spirit in this land—has
a good steady income and a stylish suit of new bandages every day, and
travels around on a shutter.
I will say, in conclusion, that my share of the welcome to our guest is
none the less hearty because I talk so much nonsense, and I know that I can
say the same for the rest of the speakers.

JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK

As I passed along by one of those monster American tea stores in New
York, I found a Chinaman sitting before it acting in the capacity of a sign.
Everybody that passed by gave him a steady stare as long as their heads
would twist over their shoulders without dislocating their necks, and a
group had stopped to stare deliberately.
Is it not a shame that we, who prate so much about civilization and
humanity, are content to degrade a fellow-being to such an office as this? Is
it not time for reflection when we find ourselves willing to see in such a

being matter for frivolous curiosity instead of regret and grave reflection?
Here was a poor creature whom hard fortune had exiled from his 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 ricefields 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 downhearted. 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 his heart. 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.

HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER
[Written about 1870.]

I 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 office, toward sundown, a group of men and boys at the foot of the
stairs dispersed with one impulse, and gave me passageway, and I heard one
or two of them say: “That’s him!” I was 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 to my aunt. I went up the short flight
of stairs, and heard cheery voices and a ringing laugh as I drew near the
door, which I opened, and caught a glimpse of two young rural-looking
men, whose faces blanched and lengthened when they saw me, and then
they both plunged through the window with a great crash. I was surprised.
In about half an hour an old gentleman, with a flowing beard and a fine
but rather austere face, entered, and sat down at my invitation. He seemed
to have something on his mind. He took off his hat and set it on the floor,
and got out of it a red silk handkerchief and a copy of our paper.
He put the paper on his lap, and while he polished his spectacles with his
handkerchief he said, “Are you the new editor?”
I said I was.
“Have you ever edited an agricultural paper 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
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 listening attitude. No sound was
heard.
Still he listened. No sound. Then he turned the key in the door, and came
elaborately tiptoeing toward me till he was within long reaching distance of
me, when he stopped and, after scanning my face with intense interest for a
while, drew a folded copy of our paper from his bosom, and said:
“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 corn-stalks and planting his buckwheat cakes
in July instead of August. Concerning the pumpkin. This
berry is a favorite with the natives of the interior of New
England, who prefer it to the 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—

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, notwithstanding
my friends kept me under watch so strict, but now I believe I am crazy; and
with that I fetched a howl that you might have heard two miles, and started
out to kill somebody—because, you know, I knew it would come to that
sooner or later, and so I might as well begin. I read one of them paragraphs
over again, so as to be certain, and then I burned my house down and
started. I have crippled several people, and have got one fellow up a tree,
where I can get him if I want him.

But I thought I would call in here as I passed along and make the thing
perfectly certain; and now it is certain, and I tell you it is lucky for the chap
that is in the tree. I should have killed him sure, as I went back. Good-by,
sir, good-by; 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-by, sir.”
I felt a little uncomfortable about the cripplings and arsons this person
had been entertaining himself with, for I could not help feeling remotely
accessory to them. But these thoughts were quickly banished, for the
regular editor walked in! [I thought to 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 those 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—I could not enjoy
it if I had it. Certainly not with you in my chair. I would always stand in
dread of what you might be going to recommend next. It makes me lose all
patience every time I think of your discussing oyster-beds under the head of
‘Landscape Gardening.’ I want you to go. Nothing on earth could persuade
me to take another holiday. Oh! why didn’t you tell me you didn’t know
anything about agriculture?”
“Tell you, you corn-stalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It’s the
first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have been in the
editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever
heard of a man’s having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper. You
turnip! Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a
parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just
as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who
review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy
leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for
knowing nothing about it. Who criticize the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen
who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to
run a foot-race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several
members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write
the 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 a 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. But I have done my duty.
I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it. I said I could
make your paper of interest to all classes—and I have. I said I could run
your circulation up to twenty thousand copies, and if I had had two more
weeks I’d have done it. And I’d have given you the best class of readers that
ever an agricultural paper had—not a farmer in it, nor a solitary individual

who could tell a watermelon-tree from a peach-vine to save his life. You are
the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant. Adios.”
I then left.

THE PETRIFIED MAN

Now, 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 extraordinary petrifactions 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 brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt called
upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant, fatherly

moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the petrifaction
mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was altogether too
delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all. I put my
scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man.
I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.——, the new coroner and
justice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him up
a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine
pleasure with business. So I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail, all
about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a hundred
and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where —— lived);
how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been to examine it
(it was notorious that there was not a living creature within fifty miles of
there, except a few starving Indians, some crippled grasshoppers, and four
or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get away); how those savants
all pronounced the petrified man to have been in a state of complete
petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with a seriousness that I
ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that as soon as Mr.——
heard the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule, and posted off, with
noble reverence for official duty, on that awful five days’ journey, through
alkali, sage brush, peril of body, and imminent starvation, to hold an inquest
on this man that had been dead and turned to everlasting stone for more
than three hundred years!

And then, my hand being “in,” so to speak, I went on, with the same
unflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that deceased
came to his death from protracted exposure. This only moved me to higher
flights of imagination, and I said that the jury, with that charity so
characteristic of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were about to give the
petrified man Christian burial, when they found that for ages a limestone
sediment had been trickling down the face of the stone against which he
was 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 blast him from his position, when Mr.
——, “with that delicacy so characteristic of him, forbade them, observing
that it would be little less than sacrilege to do such a thing.”
From beginning to end the “Petrified Man” squib was a string of roaring
absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretense 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 sitting
to explain to the public that he was a swindle. Yet I purposely mixed that up
with other things, hoping to make it obscure—and I did. I would describe
the position of one foot, and then say his right thumb was against the side of
his nose; then talk about his other foot, and presently come back and say the
fingers of his right hand were spread apart; then talk about the back of his
head a little, and return and say the left thumb was hooked into the right
little finger; then ramble off about 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 and 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 the list 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 Petrified Man copied and
guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction; and as
my gentleman’s field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges I saw that
he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory, state after
state, and land after land, till he swept the great globe and 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.

MY BLOODY MASSACRE

The other burlesque I have referred to was my fine satire upon the
financial expedients of “cooking dividends,” a thing which became
shamefully frequent on the Pacific coast for a while. Once more, in my self-
complacent simplicity I felt that the time had arrived for me to rise up and
be a reformer. I put this reformatory satire in the shape of a fearful
“Massacre at Empire City.” The San Francisco papers were making a great
outcry about the iniquity of the Daney Silver-Mining Company, whose
directors had declared a “cooked” or false dividend, for the purpose of

increasing the value of their stock, so that they could sell out at a
comfortable figure, and then scramble from under the tumbling concern.
And while abusing the Daney, those papers did not forget to urge the public
to get rid of all their silver stocks and invest in sound and safe San
Francisco stocks, such as the Spring Valley Water Company, etc. But right
at this unfortunate 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
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 them 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 bachelor, and consequently he could not
murder his wife and nine children; he murdered them “in his splendid
dressed-stone mansion just in the edge of the great pine forest between
Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” when even the very pickled oysters that
came on our tables knew that there was not a “dressed-stone mansion” in all
Nevada Territory; also that, so far from there being a “great pine forest
between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” there wasn’t a solitary tree within
fifteen miles of either place; and, 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 between
them; and on top of all these absurdities I stated that this diabolical
murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself that the reader ought to
have seen would kill 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 éclat, 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 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 clothing which was the sign and
evidence that they were in from the Truckee with a load of hay. The one

facing me had the morning paper folded to a long, narrow strip, and I knew,
without any telling, that that strip represented the column that contained my
pleasant financial satire. From the way he was excitedly mumbling, I saw
that the heedless son of a hay-mow was skipping with all his might, in order
to get to the bloody details as quickly as possible; and so he was missing the
guide-boards I had set up to warn him that the whole thing was a fraud.
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:
“Jim, he b’iled his baby, and he took the old ’oman’s skelp. Cuss’d if I
want any breakfast!”
And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend
departed from the restaurant empty but satisfied.
He never got down to where the satire part of it began. Nobody ever did.
They found the thrilling particulars sufficient. To drop in with a poor little
moral at the fag-end of such a gorgeous massacre was like following 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 telltale absurdities and impossibilities concerning the “great pine
forest,” the “dressed-stone mansion,” etc. But I found out then, and never
have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatory surroundings
of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that
some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; we skip all that, and
hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and be happy.

THE UNDERTAKER’S CHAT

“Now that corpse,” said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of
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.
I couldn’t get it. There warn’t going to be time—anybody could see that.
“Corpse said never mind, shake him up some kind of a box he could
stretch out in comfortable, he warn’t particular ’bout the general style of it.
Said he went more on room than style, anyway in a last final container.
“Friends wanted a silver door-plate on the coffin, signifying who he was
and wher’ he was from. Now you know a fellow couldn’t roust out such a
gaily thing as that in a little country-town like this. What did corpse say?
“Corpse said, whitewash his old canoe and dob his address and general
destination onto it with a 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. He warn’t distressed any more than
you be—on the contrary, just as ca’m and collected as a hearse-horse; said
he judged that wher’ he was going to a body would find it considerable
better to attract attention by a picturesque moral character than a natty
burial-case with a swell door-plate on it.
“Splendid man, he was. I’d druther do for a corpse like that ’n any I’ve
tackled in seven year. There’s some satisfaction in buryin’ a man like that.
You feel that what you’re doing is appreciated. Lord bless you, so’s he got
planted before he sp’iled, he was perfectly satisfied; said his relations meant
well, perfectly well, but all them preparations was bound to delay the thing
more or less, and he didn’t wish to be kept layin’ around. You never see
such a clear head as what he had—and so ca’m and so cool. Jist a hunk of
brains—that is what he was. Perfectly awful. It was a ripping distance from
one end of that man’s head to t’other. Often and over again he’s had brain-
fever a-raging in one place, and the rest of the pile didn’t know anything
about it—didn’t affect it any more than an Injun Insurrection in 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 him behind. He
was the most down on style of any remains I ever struck. A beautiful,
simpleminded 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 downhearted, 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.
“I never see a man snuffed out so sudden. Ah, it was a great loss—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 I didn’t
respect his last wishes and tow him behind the hearse I’ll be cuss’d. I
consider that whatever a corpse wants done for his comfort is little enough
matter, and a man hain’t got no right to deceive him or take advantage of
him; and whatever a corpse trusts me to do I’m a-going to do, you know,
even if it’s to stuff him and paint him yaller and keep him for a keepsake—
you hear me!”
He cracked his whip and went lumbering away with his ancient ruin of a
hearse, and I continued my walk with a valuable lesson learned—that a
healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any
occupation. The lesson is likely to be lasting, for it will take many months

to obliterate the memory of the remarks and circumstances that impressed
it.

CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS

Against all chambermaids, of whatsoever age or nationality, I launch the
curse of bachelordom! Because:
They always put the pillows at the opposite end of the bed from the gas-
burner, so that while you read and smoke before sleeping (as is the ancient
and honored custom of bachelors), you have to hold your book aloft, in an
uncomfortable position, to keep the light from dazzling your eyes.
When they find the pillows removed to the other end of the bed in the
morning, they receive not the suggestion in a friendly spirit; but, glorying in
their absolute sovereignty, and unpitying your 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 bootjack, and swear.
They always put the matchbox 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 thereabout, 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 contrary this way. They
would die if they couldn’t be villains.
They always save up all the old scraps of printed rubbish you throw on
the floor, and stack them up carefully on the table, and start the fire with
your valuable manuscripts. If there is any one particular old scrap that you
are more down on than any other, and which you are gradually wearing
your life out trying to get rid of, you may take all the pains you possibly can
in that direction, but it won’t be of any use, because they will always fetch
that old scrap back and put it in the same old place again every time. It does
them good.

And they use up more hair-oil than any six men. If charged with
purloining the same, they lie about it. What do they care about a hereafter?
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
pretense 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.

AURELIA’S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN
[Written about 1865.]

The 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 heartbroken by the
misfortunes she has undergone, and so confused by the conflicting counsels
of misguided friends and insidious enemies that she does not know what
course to pursue in order to extricate herself from the web of difficulties in
which she seems almost hopelessly involved. In this dilemma she turns to
me for help, and supplicates for my guidance and instruction with a moving
eloquence that would touch the heart of a statue. Hear her sad story:
She says that when she was sixteen years old she met and loved, with all
the devotion of a passionate nature, a young man from New Jersey, named

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 smallpox of the
most virulent type, and when he recovered from his illness his face was
pitted like a waffle-mold, and his comeliness gone forever. 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 passing from her by piecemeal, feeling, as she did,
that he could not last forever under this disastrous process of reduction, yet
knowing of no way to stop its dreadful career, and in her tearful despair she
almost regretted, like brokers who hold on and lose, that she had not taken
him at first, 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 of 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.
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 forever,
and in that hour of bitterness he almost cursed the mistaken mercy that had
spared his head.
At last Aurelia is in serious perplexity as to what she ought to do. She
still loves her Breckinridge, she writes, with truly womanly feeling—she
still loves what is left of him—but her parents are bitterly 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 asked 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 responsibility 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 mean time,
marry him and take the chances. It does not seem to me that there is much
risk, anyway, 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 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

A grand affair of a ball—the Pioneers’—came off at the Occidental some
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 ‘pâté de foie gras,’ made expressly
for her, and was greatly admired. Miss S. had her hair done up. She was the
center of attraction for the gentlemen and the envy of all the ladies. Mrs. G.
W. was tastefully dressed in a ‘tout ensemble,’ and was greeted with
deafening applause wherever she went. Mrs. C. N. was superbly arrayed in
white kid gloves. Her modest and 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 in a 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 ‘bon jour’ effect they naturally produced was heightened
by her enchanting and well-sustained smile.
Miss R. P., with that repugnance to ostentation in dress which is so
peculiar to her, was attired in a simple white lace collar, fastened with a neat
pearl-button solitaire. The fine contrast between the 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 enameled, 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.

ABOUT BARBERS

All things change except barbers, the ways of barbers, and the
surroundings of barbers. These never change. What one experiences in a
barber’s shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in
barbers’ shops afterward 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 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. 1 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
customers’ cheeks, and it was about an even thing which one would say
“Next!” first, my very breath stood still with the suspense. But when at the
culminating moment No. 1 stopped to pass a comb a couple of times
through his customer’s eyebrows, I saw that he had lost the race by a single
instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop, to keep from falling into
the hands of No. 2; for I have none of that enviable firmness that enables a
man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he will
wait for his fellow-barber’s chair.
I stayed out fifteen minutes, and then went back, hoping for better luck.
Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting,
silent, unsociable, distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who are
waiting their turn in a barber’s shop. I sat down in one of the iron-armed
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 bayrum
bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the private shaving-cups
in the pigeonholes; 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 center-table, and conned
their unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events.

At last my turn came. A voice said “Next!” and I surrendered to—No. 2,
of course. It always happens so. I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it
affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it. He shoved up my head,
and put a napkin under it. He plowed 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 regarding himself in the
glass, stopping now and then to get close and examine his chin critically or
inspect a pimple. Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was
about to lather the other, when a dog-fight attracted his attention, and he ran
to the window and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result
in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction. He
finished lathering, and then began to rub in the suds with his hand.

He now began to sharpen his razor on an old suspender, and was delayed
a good deal on account of a controversy about a cheap masquerade ball he
had figured at the night before, in red cambric and bogus ermine, as some
kind of a king. He was so gratified with being chaffed about some damsel
whom he had smitten with his charms that he used every means to continue
the controversy by pretending to be annoyed at the chaffings of his fellows.
This matter begot more surveyings of himself in the glass, and he put down
his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care, plastering an inverted
arch of it down on his forehead, accomplishing an accurate “part” behind,
and brushing the two wings forward over his ears with nice exactness. In
the mean time 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
shaving the corners of my upper lip, and it was by this bit of circumstantial
evidence that I discovered that a part of his duties in the shop was to clean
the kerosene-lamps. I had often wondered in an indolent way whether the
barbers did that, or whether it was the boss.
About this time I was amusing myself trying to guess where he would be
most likely to cut me this time, but he got ahead of me, and sliced me on the
end of the chin before I had got my mind made up. He immediately
sharpened his razor—he might have done it before. I do not like a close
shave, and would not let him go over me a second time. I tried to get him to
put up his razor, dreading that he would make for the side of my chin, my
pet tender spot, a place 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 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 choked the wound with powdered starch, then soaked it

with bay rum again, and would have gone on soaking and powdering it
forevermore, no doubt, if I had not rebelled and begged off. He powdered
my whole face now, straightened me up, and began to plow my hair
thoughtfully with his hands. Then he suggested a shampoo, and said my
hair needed it badly, very badly. I observed that I shampooed 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’s 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, rubbed and scrubbed a good deal of it out by the roots,
and combed and brushed the rest, parting it behind, and plastering the
eternal inverted arch of hair down on my forehead, and then, while combing
my scant eyebrows and defiling them with pomade, strung out an account
of the achievements of a six-ounce black-and-tan terrier of his till I heard
the whistles blow for noon, and knew I was five minutes too late for the
train. Then he snatched away the towel, brushed it lightly about my face,
passed his comb through my eyebrows once more, and gaily sang out
“Next!”
This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later. I am waiting
over a day for my revenge—I am going to attend his funeral.

"PARTY CRIES” IN IRELAND

Belfast is a peculiarly religious community. This may be said of the
whole of the North of Ireland. About one-half of the people are Protestants
and the other half Catholics. Each party does all it can to make its own
doctrines popular and draw the affections of the irreligious toward them.
One hears constantly of the most touching instances of this zeal. A week
ago a vast concourse of Catholics assembled at Armagh to dedicate a new
Cathedral; and when they started home again the roadways were lined with
groups of 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
admonish 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 of twelve years old was fined the usual forty
shillings and costs for proclaiming 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 himself with shouting, “To hell with!” “To hell 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 [Written about 1867]
WASHINGTON, December, 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 so I
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 government 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 I 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 picnic. 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 in a 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
committed a crime of some kind. But I didn’t mind. I said it was cheap, and

full of 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 besides 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 some time 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 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 wood-cuts. 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 an ass. 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 confrères had conspired 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:
“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 been 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 committees are not members of the Cabinet. Neither are the
doorkeepers of the Capitol, 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 any wise 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, clamshells, 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 I am going to work for six dollars a
day? If that is the idea, let me recommend the Senate Committee on
Conchology to hire somebody else. I am the slave of no 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. Clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology, Dr

To consultation with Secretary of War $50
To consultation with Secretary of Navy $50
To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury $50

Cabinet consultation No charge
To mileage to and from Jerusalem, via Egypt,
Algiers, Gibraltar, and Cadiz,
14,000 miles, at 20c. a mile $2,800
To salary as Clerk of Senate Committee
on Conchology, six days, at $6 per day $36

Total $2,986

—[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.]

Not an item of this bill has been paid, except that trifle of thirty-six
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.
I am 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 be 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 sustenance at the restaurant—
but they work. I know one who has to paste all sorts of little scraps from the
newspapers into a scrapbook—sometimes as many as eight or ten scraps a
day. He doesn’t do it well, but he does it as well as he can. It is very
fatiguing. It is exhausting to the intellect. Yet he only gets eighteen hundred
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
scrapbook 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 twenty-five hundred dollars a year. What

they write has to be written over again by other clerks sometimes; 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—and while they are waiting, they only get barely two thousand dollars
a year for it. It is sad—it is 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 two thousand or three thousand
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.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

The following I find in a Sandwich Island paper which some friend has
sent me from that tranquil far-off retreat. The coincidence between my own
experience and that here set down by the late Mr. Benton is so remarkable
that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the paragraph. The
Sandwich Island paper says:
How touching is this tribute of the late Hon. T. H. Benton to his mother’s
influence:—‘My mother asked me never to use tobacco; I have never
touched it from that time to the present day. She asked me not to gamble,
and I have never gambled. I cannot tell who is losing in games that are
being played. She admonished me, too, against liquor-drinking, and
whatever capacity for endurance I have at present, and whatever usefulness
I may have attained through life, I attribute to having complied with her