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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta name="generator" content="HTML-Kit Tools HTML Tidy plugin" />
+    <title>
+      SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, COMPLETE
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
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+    P { text-indent:   2em;
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+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; }
+    HR  { width: 33%; text-align: center; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 90%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+		div.fig     { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+                .figleft   {float: left;}
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+    .toc       { margin-left: 15%; margin-bottom: 0em;}
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+  <body>
+    <h1>
+      SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+    </h1>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sketches New and Old, Complete
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Sketches New and Old, Complete
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #3189]
+Last Updated: October 18, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="boxnote">
+      <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3189/old/orig3189-h/main.htm">LINK
+      TO ORIGINAL HTML FILE: This Ebook Has Been Reformatted For Better
+      Appearance In Mobile Viewers Such As Kindles And Others. The Original
+      Format, Which The Editor Believes Has A More Attractive Appearance For
+      Laptops And Other Computers, May Be Viewed By Clicking On This Box.</a></i>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      by Mark Twain
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Complete
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/cover.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontispiece.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CONTENTS:
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a href="#watch">MY WATCH</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#political">POLITICAL
+      ECONOMY</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#frog">THE JUMPING FROG</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#journalism">JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#badboy">THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#goodboy">THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#poems">A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#niagara">NIAGARA</a><br /><br /><br /><br /> <a href="#answers">ANSWERS
+      TO CORRESPONDENTS</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#poultry">TO RAISE
+      POULTRY</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#croup">EXPERIENCE OF THE
+      MCWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#venture">MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#newark">HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK</a><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <a href="#bore">THE OFFICE BORE</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#greer">JOHNNY
+      GREER</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#beef">THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF
+      THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#fisher">THE
+      CASE OF GEORGE FISHER</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#persecution">DISGRACEFUL
+      PERSECUTION OF A BOY</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#spirited">THE
+      JUDGES "SPIRITED WOMAN"</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#information">INFORMATION
+      WANTED</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#oldboys">SOME LEARNED FABLES,
+      FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#senatorial">MY
+      LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#fashion">A
+      FASHION ITEM</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#riley">RILEY-NEWSPAPER
+      CORRESPONDENT</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#oldman">A FINE OLD MAN</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#science">SCIENCE vs. LUCK</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#franklin">THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#bloke">MR. BLOKE'S ITEM</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#medieval">A
+      MEDIEVAL ROMANCE</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#petition">PETITION
+      CONCERNING COPYRIGHT</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#afterdinner">AFTER-DINNER
+      SPEECH</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#murderers">LIONIZING MURDERERS</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#newcrime">A NEW CRIME</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#dream">A CURIOUS DREAM</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#truestory">A
+      TRUE STORY</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#twins">THE SIAMESE TWINS</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#scottish">SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#ghost">A GHOST STORY</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#venus">THE CAPITOLINE VENUS</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#insurance">SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#chinaman">JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#agricultural">HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#petrified">THE PETRIFIED MAN</a><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <a href="#massacre">MY BLOODY MASSACRE</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#undertaker">THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#chambermaids">CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#aurelia">AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN</a><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <a href="#jenkins">"AFTER" JENKINS</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#barbers">ABOUT BARBERS</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#ireland">"PARTY
+      CRIES" IN IRELAND</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#resignation">THE
+      FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#history">HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#curiosity">HONORED AS A CURIOSITY</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#ward">FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#cannibalism">CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a
+      href="#caesar">THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"</a><br /><br />
+      <br /><br /> <a href="#widow">THE WIDOW'S PROTEST</a><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <a href="#panoramist">THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST</a><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <a href="#cold">CURING A COLD</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#excursion">A
+      CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#governor">RUNNING
+      FOR GOVERNOR</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /> <a href="#mysterious">A MYSTERIOUS
+      VISIT</a><br /><br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      Part 1.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="watch" id="watch"></a>MY WATCH
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE&mdash;[Written about 1870.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p017.jpg (147K)" src="images/p017.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p018.jpg (23K)" src="images/p018.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p019.jpg (28K)" src="images/p019.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "She makes too much steam&mdash;you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the
+      safety-valve!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="political" id="political">POLITICAL ECONOMY</a>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p021.jpg (104K)" src="images/p021.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> Political Economy is the basis of all good government. The wisest
+        men of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the&mdash;
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      [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&mdash;go
+      on&mdash;what about it?" He said there was nothing about it, in particular&mdash;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&mdash;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.]
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 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&mdash;
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      [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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;" "There, now, there," I said, "put on the other
+      eight&mdash;add five hundred feet of spiral-twist&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.]
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 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&mdash;
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      [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&mdash;"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!&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;further than to smile
+      sweetly&mdash;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.]
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 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:
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,<br /> Post mortem unum, ante bellum,<br />
+        Hic jacet hoc, ex-parte res,<br /> Politicum e-conomico est.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 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&mdash;
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      ["Now, not a word out of you&mdash;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?&mdash;'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."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THREE DAYS LATER.&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p026.jpg (86K)" src="images/p026.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="frog" id="frog"></a>THE JUMPING FROG
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1865]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p028.jpg (125K)" src="images/p028.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IN ENGLISH. THEN IN FRENCH. THEN CLAWED BACK INTO A CIVILIZED LANGUAGE
+      ONCE MORE BY PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;, and
+      after the latter my retranslation from the French]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY<br /> [Pronounced
+      Cal-e-va-ras]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p030.jpg (44K)" src="images/p030.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Rev. Leonidas W. H'm, Reverend Le&mdash;well, there was a feller here,
+      once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49&mdash;or maybe it was
+      the spring of '50&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p031.jpg (27K)" src="images/p031.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;he'd bet on any thing&mdash;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&mdash;thank
+      the Lord for his inf'nite mercy&mdash;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.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Thish-yer Smiley had a mare&mdash;the boys called her the fifteen-minute
+      nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster
+      than that&mdash;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&mdash;and
+      always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could
+      cipher it down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;which was the name
+      of the pup&mdash;Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was
+      satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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&mdash;and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l
+      Webster down here on this floor&mdash;Dan'l Webster was the name of the
+      frog&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p033.jpg (37K)" src="images/p033.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;a
+      stranger in the camp, he was&mdash;come acrost him with his box, and says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'What might it be that you've got in the box?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, 'It might be a parrot, or it
+      might be a canary, maybe, but it ain't&mdash;it's only just a frog.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round
+      this way and that, and says, 'H'm&mdash;so 'tis. Well, what's HE good for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Well,' Smiley says, easy and careless, 'he's good enough for one thing,
+      I should judge&mdash;he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'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.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And then Smiley says, 'That's all right&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;filled him pretty near up to his chin&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'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&mdash;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&mdash;so&mdash;like a Frenchman, but it warn't no
+      use&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;so&mdash;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.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;I wonder if there ain't something the matter with
+      him&mdash;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&mdash;he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he
+      never ketched him. And&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p035.jpg (39K)" src="images/p035.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [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&mdash;I ain't going to be
+      gone a second."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me
+      and recommenced:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about
+      the afflicted cow, but took my leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now let the learned look upon this picture and say if iconoclasm can
+      further go:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [From the Revue des Deux Mondes, of July 15th, 1872.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> .......................<br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE JUMPING FROG
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      [From the Revue des Deux Mondes, of July 15th, 1872.]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          .......................
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      LA GRENOUILLE SAUTEUSE DU COMTE DE CALAVERAS
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "&mdash;Il y avait, une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim
+      Smiley: c'&eacute;tait dans l'hiver de 49, peut-&ecirc;tre bien au
+      printemps de 50, je ne me reappelle pas exactement. Ce qui me fait croire
+      que c'&eacute;tait l'un ou l'autre, c'est que je me souviens que le grand
+      bief n'&eacute;tait pas achev&eacute; lorsqu'il arriva au camp pour la
+      premi&eacute;re fois, mais de toutes facons il &eacute;tait l'homme le
+      plus friand de paris qui se p&ucirc;t voir, pariant sur tout ce qui se pr&eacute;sentait,
+      quand il pouvait trouver un adversaire, et, quand n'en trouvait pas il
+      passait du c&ocirc;t&eacute; oppos&eacute;. Tout ce qui convenait &agrave;
+      l'autre lui convenait; pourvu qu'il e&ucirc;t un pari, Smiley &eacute;tait
+      satisfait. Et il avait une chance! une chance inouie: presque toujours il
+      gagnait. It faut dire qu'il &eacute;tait toujours pr&ecirc;t &agrave;
+      s'exposer, qu'on ne pouvait mentionner la moindre chose sans que ce
+      gaillard offr&icirc;t de parier l&agrave;-dessus n'importe quoi et de
+      prendre le c&ocirc;te que l'on voudrait, comme je vous le disais tout
+      &agrave; l'heure. S'il y avait des courses, vous le trouviez riche ou ruin&eacute;
+      &agrave; 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;&mdash;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 r&eacute;guli&egrave;rement pour le cur&eacute; Walker,
+      qu'il jugeait &ecirc;tre le meilleur pr&eacute;dicateur des environs, et
+      qui l'&eacute;tait en effet, et un brave homme. Il aurait rencontr&eacute;
+      une punaise de bois en chemin, qu'il aurait pari&eacute; sur le temps
+      qu'il lui faudrait pour aller o&ugrave; 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 cur&eacute; Walker fut tr&egrave;s malade pendant longtemps, il
+      semblait qu'on ne la sauverait pas; mais un matin le cur&eacute; arrive,
+      et Smiley lui demande comment ella va et il dit qu'elle est bien mieux, gr&acirc;ce
+      a l'infinie mis&eacute;ricorde tellement mieux qu'avec la b&eacute;n&eacute;diction
+      de la Providence elle s'en tirerait, et voil&aacute; que, sans y penser,
+      Smiley r&eacute;pond:&mdash;Eh bien! je gage deux et demi qu'elle mourra
+      tout de m&ecirc;me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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 &eacute;tait plus vite que ca! Et il avait coutume de gagner
+      de l'argent avec cette b&ecirc;te, quoi-qu'elle f&ucirc;t 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 d&eacute;part,
+      puis on la d&eacute;passait sans peine; mais jamais &agrave; la fin elle
+      ne manquait de s'&eacute;chauffer, de s'exasp&eacute;rer et elle arrivait,
+      s'&eacute;cartant, se d&eacute;fendant, ses jambes gr&ecirc;les en l'air
+      devant les obstacles, quelquefois les &eacute;vitant et faisant avec cela
+      plus de poussi&egrave;re qu'aucun cheval, plus de bruit surtout avec ses
+      &eacute;ternumens et reniflemens.&mdash;-crac! elle arrivait donc toujours
+      premi&egrave;re d'une t&ecirc;te, aussi juste qu'on peut le mesurer. Et il
+      avait un petit bouledogue qui, &agrave; le voir, ne valait pas un sou; on
+      aurait cru que parier contre lui c'&eacute;tait voler, tant il &eacute;tait
+      ordinaire; mais aussit&ocirc;t les enjeux faits, il devenait un autre
+      chien. Sa m&acirc;choire inf&eacute;rieure commencait &agrave; ressortir
+      comme un gaillard d'avant, ses dents se d&eacute;couvcraient brillantes
+      commes des fournaises, et un chien pouvait le taquiner, l'exciter, le
+      mordre, le jeter deux ou trois fois par-dessus son &eacute;paule, Andr&eacute;
+      Jackson, c'&eacute;tait le nom du chien, Andr&eacute; Jackson prenait cela
+      tranquillement, comme s'il ne se f&ucirc;t jamais attendu &agrave; autre
+      chose, et quand les paris &eacute;taient doubl&eacute;s et redoubl&eacute;s
+      contre lui, il vous saisissait l'autre chien juste &agrave; l'articulation
+      de la jambe de derri&egrave;re, et il ne la l&acirc;chait plus, non pas
+      qu'il la m&acirc;ch&acirc;t, vous concevez, mais il s'y serait tenu pendu
+      jusqu'&agrave; ce qu'on jet&acirc;t l'&eacute;ponge en l'air, fall&ucirc;t-il
+      attendre un an. Smiley gagnait toujours avec cette b&ecirc;te-l&agrave;;
+      malheureusement ils ont fini par dresser un chien qui n'avait pas de
+      pattes de derri&egrave;re, parce qu'on les avait sci&eacute;es, et quand
+      les choses furent au point qu'il voulait, et qu'il en vint &agrave; se
+      jeter sur son morceau favori, le pauvre chien comprit en un instant qu'on
+      s'&eacute;tait moqu&eacute; de lui, et que l'autre le tenait. Vous n'avez
+      jamais vu personne avoir l'air plus penaud et plus d&eacute;courag&eacute;;
+      il ne fit aucun effort pour gagner le combat et fut rudement secou&eacute;,
+      de sorte que, regardant Smiley comme pour lui dire:&mdash;Mon coeur est
+      bris&eacute;, c'est ta faute; pourquoi m'avoir livr&eacute; &agrave; un
+      chien qui n'a pas de pattes de derri&egrave;re, puisque c'est par l&agrave;
+      que je les bats?&mdash;il s'en alla en clopinant, et se coucha pour
+      mourir. Ah! c'&eacute;tait un bon chien, cet Andr&eacute; Jackson, et il
+      se serait fait un nom, s'il avait v&eacute;cu, car il y avait de l'etoffe
+      en lui, il avait du g&eacute;nie, je la sais, bien que de grandes
+      occasions lui aient manqu&eacute;; mais il est impossible de supposer
+      qu'un chien capable de se battre comme lui, certaines circonstances
+      &eacute;tant donn&eacute;es, ait manqu&eacute; de talent. Je me sens
+      triste toutes les fois que je pense &agrave; son dernier combat et au d&eacute;no&ucirc;ment
+      qu'il a eu. Eh bien! ce Smiley nourrissait des terriers &agrave; rats, et
+      des coqs combat, et des chats, et toute sorte de choses, au point qu'il
+      &eacute;tait toujours en mesure de vous tenir t&ecirc;te, 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 pr&eacute;tendait faire son &eacute;ducation;
+      vous me croirez si vous voulez, mais pendant trois mois il n'a rien fait
+      que lui apprendre &agrave; sauter dans une cour retir&eacute;e de sa
+      maison. Et je vous r&eacute;ponds qu'il avait reussi. Il lui donnait un
+      petit coup par derri&egrave;re, et l'instant d'apr&egrave;s vous voyiez la
+      grenouille tourner en l'air comme un beignet au-dessus de la po&ecirc;le,
+      faire une culbute, quelquefois deux, lorsqu'elle &eacute;tait bien partie,
+      et retomber sur ses pattes comme un chat. Il l'avait dress&eacute;e dans
+      l'art de gober des mouches, er l'y exercait continuellement, si bien
+      qu'une mouche, du plus loin qu'elle apparaissait, &eacute;tait une mouche
+      perdue. Smiley avait coutume de dire que tout ce qui manquait &agrave; une
+      grenouille, c'&eacute;tait l'&eacute;ducation, qu'avec l'&eacute;ducation
+      elle pouvait faire presque tout, et je le crois. Tenez, je l'ai vu poser
+      Daniel Webster l&agrave; sur se plancher,&mdash;Daniel Webster &eacute;tait
+      le nom de la grenouille,&mdash;et lui chanter: Des mouches! Daniel, des
+      mouches!&mdash;En un clin d'oeil, Daniel avait bondi et saisi une mouche
+      ici sur le comptoir, puis saut&eacute; de nouveau par terre, o&ugrave; il
+      restait vraiment &agrave; se gratter la t&ecirc;te avec sa patte de derri&egrave;re,
+      comme s'il n'avait pas eu la moindre id&eacute;e de sa superiorit&eacute;.
+      Jamais vous n'avez grenouille vu de aussi modeste, aussi naturelle, douee
+      comme elle l'&eacute;tait! 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 esp&egrave;ce que vous puissiez conna&icirc;tre.
+      Sauter &agrave; plat, c'&eacute;tait 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 &eacute;tait monstrueusement
+      fier de sa grenouille, et il en avait le droit, car des gens qui avaient
+      voyag&eacute;, qui avaient tout vu, disaient qu'on lui ferait injure de la
+      comparer &agrave; une autre; de facon que Smiley gardait Daniel dans une
+      petite bo&icirc;te a claire-voie qu'il emportait parfois &agrave; la Ville
+      pour quelque pari.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Un jour, un individu &eacute;tranger au camp l'arr&ecirc;te aver sa bo&icirc;te
+      et lui dit:&mdash;Qu'est-ce que vous avez donc serr&eacute; l&agrave;
+      dedans?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Smiley dit d'un air indiff&eacute;rent:&mdash;Cela pourrait &ecirc;tre un
+      perroquet ou un serin, mais ce n'est rien de pareil, ce n'est qu'une
+      grenouille.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "L'individu la prend, la regarde avec soin, la tourne d'un c&ocirc;t&eacute;
+      et de l'autre puis il dit.&mdash;Tiens! en effet! A quoi estelle bonne?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "&mdash;Mon Dieu! r&eacute;pond Smiley, toujours d'un air d&eacute;gag&eacute;,
+      elle est bonne pour une chose &agrave; mon avis, elle peut battre en
+      sautant toute grenouille du comt&eacute; de Calaveras.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "L'individu reprend la bo&icirc;te, l'examine de nouveau longuement, et la
+      rend &agrave; Smiley en disant d'un air d&eacute;lib&eacute;r&eacute;:&mdash;Eh
+      bien! je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune
+      grenouille.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "&mdash;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'exp&eacute;rience, et possible que vous ne
+      soyez qu'un amateur. De toute mani&egrave;re, je parie quarante dollars
+      qu'elle battra en sautant n'importe quelle grenouille du comt&eacute; de
+      Calaveras.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "L'individu r&eacute;fl&eacute;chit une seconde et dit comme attrist&eacute;:&mdash;Je
+      ne suis qu'un &eacute;tranger ici, je n'ai pas de grenouille; mais, si
+      j'en avais une, je tiendrais le pari.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "&mdash;Fort bien! r&eacute;pond Smiley. Rien de plus facile. Si vous
+      voulez tenir ma bo&icirc;te une minute, j'irai vous chercher une
+      grenouille.&mdash;Voil&agrave; donc l'individu qui garde la bo&icirc;te,
+      qui met ses quarante dollars sur ceux de Smiley et qui attend. Il attend
+      assez longtemps, r&eacute;flechissant tout seul, et figurez-vous qu'il
+      prend Daniel, lui ouvre la bouche de force at avec une cuiller &agrave; th&eacute;
+      l'emplit de menu plomb de chasse, mais l'emplit jusqu'au menton, puis il
+      le pose par terre. Smiley pendant ce temps &eacute;tait &agrave; barboter
+      dans une mare. Finalement il attrape une grenouille, l'apporte &agrave;
+      cet individu et dit:&mdash;Maintenant, si vous &ecirc;tes pr&ecirc;t,
+      mettez-la tout contra Daniel, avec leurs pattes de devant sur la m&ecirc;me
+      ligne, et je donnerai le signal; puis il ajoute:&mdash;Un, deux, trois,
+      sautez!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Lui et l'individu touchent leurs grenouilles par derri&egrave;re, et la
+      grenouille neuve se met &agrave; sautiller, mais Daniel se soul&egrave;ve
+      lourdement, hausse les &eacute;paules ainsi, comme un Francais; &agrave;
+      quoi bon? il ne pouvait bouger, il &eacute;tait plant&eacute; solide comma
+      une enclume, il n'avancait pas plus que si on l'e&ucirc;t mis &agrave;
+      l'ancre. Smiley fut surpris et d&eacute;go&ucirc;t&eacute;, 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'&eacute;paule,
+      comma ca, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air d&eacute;lib&eacute;r&eacute;:&mdash;Eh
+      bien! je ne vois pas qua cette grenouille ait rien de muiex qu'une autre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Smiley se gratta longtemps la t&ecirc;te, les yeux fix&eacute;s sur
+      Daniel; jusqu'&agrave; ce qu'enfin il dit:&mdash;Je me demande comment
+      diable il se fait que cette b&ecirc;te ait refus&eacute; . . . Est-ce
+      qu'elle aurait quelque chose? . . . On croirait qu'elle est enfle&eacute;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Il empoigne Daniel par la peau du cou, le soul&eacute;ve et dit:&mdash;Le
+      loup me croque, s'il ne p&egrave;se pas cinq livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Il le retourne, et le malheureux crache deux poign&eacute;es de plomb.
+      Quand Smiley reconnut ce qui en &eacute;tait, il fut comme fou. Vous le
+      voyez d'ici poser sa grenouille par terra et courir apr&eacute;s cet
+      individu, mais il ne le rattrapa jamais, et ...."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Translation of the above back from the French:]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &agrave;
+      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 &mdash;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 cur&eacute;
+      Walker, which he judged to be the best predicator of the neighborhood (pr&eacute;dicateur
+      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&mdash;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, gr&acirc;ce
+      a l'infinie mis&eacute;ricorde) 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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?&mdash;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 &eacute;chauffer, of herself
+      exasperate, and she arrives herself &eacute;cartant, 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&mdash;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,
+      Andr&eacute; Jackson&mdash;this was the name of the dog&mdash;Andr&eacute;
+      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-l&agrave;;
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eh bien! this Smiley nourished some terriers &agrave; 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 &agrave; 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 &mdash;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&mdash;and I him believe.
+      Tenez, I him have seen pose Daniel Webster there upon this plank&mdash;Daniel
+      Webster was the name of the frog&mdash;and to him sing, "Some flies,
+      Daniel, some flies!"&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day an individual stranger at the camp him arrested with his box and
+      him said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What is this that you have them shut up there within?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Smiley said, with an air indifferent:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "That could be a paroquet, or a syringe (ou un serin), but this no is
+      nothing of such, it not is but a frog."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side and
+      from the other, then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Tiens! in effect!&mdash;At what is she good?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My God!" respond Smiley, always with an air disengaged, "she is good for
+      one thing, to my notice (&agrave; mon avis), she can batter in jumping
+      (elle peut battre en sautant) all frogs of the county of Calaveras."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The individual retook the box, it examined of new longly, and it rendered
+      to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.&mdash;M. T.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley, "possible that you&mdash;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 mani&egrave;re) I bet forty dollars
+      that she batter in jumping no matter which frog of the county of
+      Calaveras."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The individual reflected a second, and said like sad:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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)."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now if you be ready, put him all against Daniel with their before feet
+      upon the same line, and I give the signal"&mdash;then he added: "One, two,
+      three&mdash;advance!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;like
+      that&mdash;at the poor Daniel, in saying with his air deliberate&mdash;(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'&eacute;paule, comme &ccedil;a, au pauvre
+      Daniel, en disant de son air d&eacute;lib&eacute;r&eacute;):
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel,
+      until that which at last he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds:"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      HARTFORD, March, 1875.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="journalism" id="journalism"></a>JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1871]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p044.jpg (134K)" src="images/p044.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a
+        correspondent who posted him as a Radical:&mdash;"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."&mdash;Exchange.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wrote as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
+    </h3>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 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.<br />
+        <br /> 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.<br /> <br /> 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.<br />
+        <br /> 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.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah," said he, "that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano&mdash;he
+      was due yesterday." And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and
+      fired&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "That stove is utterly ruined," said the chief editor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said I believed it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, no matter&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
+    </h3>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 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&mdash;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.<br />
+        <br /> That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry
+        of Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.<br /> <br /> 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.<br />
+        <br /> Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement&mdash;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.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "Now that is the way to write&mdash;peppery and to the point.
+      Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;I
+      began to feel in the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief said, "That was the Colonel, likely. I've been expecting him for
+      two days. He will be up now right away."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward with a
+      dragoon revolver in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said, "Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this
+      mangy sheet?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Right, Sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are at
+      leisure we will begin."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual
+      Development in America' to finish, but there is no hurry. Begin."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He continued, "Jones will be here at three&mdash;cowhide him. Gillespie
+      will call earlier, perhaps&mdash;throw him out of the window. Ferguson
+      will be along about four&mdash;kill him. That is all for today, I believe.
+      If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police&mdash;give
+      the chief inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in the
+      drawer&mdash;ammunition there in the corner&mdash;lint and bandages up
+      there in the pigeonholes. In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon,
+      downstairs. He advertises&mdash;we take it out in trade."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p049.jpg (68K)" src="images/p049.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said, "You'll like this place when you get used to it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the
+      hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p050.jpg (64K)" src="images/p050.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="badboy" id="badboy"></a>THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1865]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p051.jpg (111K)" src="images/p051.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He didn't have any sick mother, either&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p052.jpg (27K)" src="images/p052.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;everything turned out differently with
+      him from the way it does to the bad Jameses in the books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p054.jpg (27K)" src="images/p054.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Jim bore a charmed life&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p055.jpg (25K)" src="images/p055.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="goodboy" id="goodboy"></a>THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1865]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p056.jpg (100K)" src="images/p056.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;to live right, and hang on as long as he could, and
+      have his dying speech all ready when his time came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p058.jpg (34K)" src="images/p058.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;it never had in any book
+      that ever he had read. He could hardly believe his senses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p060.jpg (27K)" src="images/p060.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.&mdash;[This glycerin
+      catastrophe is borrowed from a floating newspaper item, whose author's
+      name I would give if I knew it.&mdash;M. T.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="poems" id="poems"></a>A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1865]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THOSE EVENING BELLS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BY THOMAS MOORE
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        Those evening bells! those evening bells!<br /> How many a tale their
+        music tells<br /> Of youth, and home, and that sweet time<br /> When last
+        I heard their soothing chime.<br /> <br /> Those joyous hours are passed
+        away;<br /> And many a heart that then was gay,<br /> Within the tomb now
+        darkly dwells,<br /> And hears no more those evening bells.<br /> <br />
+        And so 'twill be when I am gone<br /> That tuneful peal will still ring
+        on;<br /> While other bards shall walk these dells,<br /> And sing your
+        praise, sweet evening bells.<br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THOSE ANNUAL BILLS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BY MARK TWAIN
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        These annual bills! these annual bills!<br /> How many a song their
+        discord trills<br /> Of "truck" consumed, enjoyed, forgot,<br /> Since I
+        was skinned by last year's lot!<br /> <br /> Those joyous beans are passed
+        away;<br /> Those onions blithe, O where are they?<br /> Once loved, lost,
+        mourned&mdash;now vexing ILLS<br /> Your shades troop back in annual
+        bills!<br /> <br /> And so 'twill be when I'm aground<br /> These yearly
+        duns will still go round,<br /> While other bards, with frantic quills,<br />
+        Shall damn and damn these annual bills!<br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="niagara" id="niagara"></a>NIAGARA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1871]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p063.jpg (103K)" src="images/p063.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p065.jpg (48K)" src="images/p065.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p066.jpg (48K)" src="images/p066.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;venerable ruin, speak!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p068.jpg (49K)" src="images/p068.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The relic said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went away from there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p069.jpg (27K)" src="images/p069.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The maiden said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I adjourned from there also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;you, Devourer of Mountains&mdash;you,
+      Roaring Thundergust&mdash;you, Bully Boy with a Glass eye&mdash;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!&mdash;and Red jacket! and Hole in the Day!&mdash;and
+      Whoopdedoodledo! Emulate their achievements! Unfurl yourselves under my
+      banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Down wid him!" "Scoop the blaggard!" "Burn him!" "Hang him!" "Dhround
+      him!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;chasing a chip and gaining on it&mdash;each round
+      trip a half-mile&mdash;reaching for the same bush on the bank forty-four
+      times, and just exactly missing it by a hair's-breadth every time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Got a match?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes; in my other vest. Help me out, please."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Not for Joe."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I came round again, I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a drowning man, but will
+      you explain this singular conduct of yours?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p071.jpg (40K)" src="images/p071.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "With pleasure. I am the coroner. Don't hurry on my account. I can wait
+      for you. But I wish I had a match."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said: "Take my place, and I'll go and get you one."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus I escaped. I am now lying in a very critical condition. At least I am
+      lying anyway&mdash;-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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon regaining my right mind, I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the beadwork and moccasins
+      for Niagara Falls, doctor. Where are they from?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Limerick, my son."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="answers" id="answers"></a>ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1865]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p072.jpg (117K)" src="images/p072.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MORAL STATISTICIAN."&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "YOUNG AUTHOR."&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "SIMON WHEELER," Sonora.&mdash;The following simple and touching remarks
+      and accompanying poem have just come to hand from the rich gold-mining
+      region of Sonora:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 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&mdash;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.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        HE DONE HIS LEVEL BEST<br /> <br /> Was he a mining on the flat&mdash;<br />
+        He done it with a zest;<br /> Was he a leading of the choir&mdash;<br />
+        He done his level best.<br /> <br /> If he'd a reg'lar task to do,<br /> He
+        never took no rest;<br /> Or if 'twas off-and-on&mdash;the same&mdash;<br />
+        He done his level best.<br /> <br /> If he was preachin' on his beat,<br />
+        He'd tramp from east to west,<br /> And north to south-in cold and heat<br />
+        He done his level best.<br /> <br /> He'd yank a sinner outen (Hades),**<br />
+        And land him with the blest;<br /> Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,<br />
+        And do his level best.<br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      **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.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,<br /> And dance and drink and jest,<br />
+        And lie and steal&mdash;all one to him&mdash;<br /> He done his level
+        best.<br /> <br /> Whate'er this man was sot to do,<br /> He done it with a
+        zest;<br /> No matter what his contract was,<br /> HE'D DO HIS LEVEL BEST.<br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR."&mdash;NO; you are not obliged to take greenbacks at
+      par.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MELTON MOWBRAY," Dutch Flat.&mdash;This correspondent sends a lot of
+      doggerel, and says it has been regarded as very good in Dutch Flat. I give
+      a specimen verse:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,<br /> And his
+        cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold;<br /> And the sheen of his
+        spears was like stars on the sea,<br /> When the blue wave rolls nightly
+        on deep Galilee.**
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      **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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;something like "Johnny Comes Marching Home." However, keep
+      on practising, and you may succeed yet. There is genius in you, but too
+      much blubber.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "ST. CLAIR HIGGINS." Los Angeles.&mdash;"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?"
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      You should set your affections on another also&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "ARITHMETICUS." Virginia, Nevada.&mdash;"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?"
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      I don't know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "AMBITIOUS LEARNER," Oakland.&mdash;Yes; you are right America was not
+      discovered by Alexander Selkirk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "DISCARDED LOVER."&mdash;"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?"
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Of course you have. All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.
+      The intention and not the act constitutes crime&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;I think I could do
+      that, if it would afford you any comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "ARTHUR AUGUSTUS."&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "YOUNG MOTHER."&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "ARITHMETICUS." Virginia, Nevada.&mdash;"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?"
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="poultry" id="poultry"></a>TO RAISE POULTRY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p081.jpg (131K)" src="images/p081.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a
+      complimentary membership upon the author. Written about 1870.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;especially
+      in California and Oregon&mdash;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.&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p082.jpg (56K)" src="images/p082.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>vertu</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p084.jpg (27K)" src="images/p084.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="croup" id="croup"></a>EXPERIENCE OF THE McWILLIAMSES WITH
+      MEMBRANOUS CROUP
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [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.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p085.jpg (129K)" src="images/p085.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Darling, I wouldn't let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were
+      you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I replied:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Love, it is notorious that pine is the least nutritious wood that a child
+      can eat."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My wife's hand paused, in the act of taking the stick, and returned itself
+      to her lap. She bridled perceptibly, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah&mdash;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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Who said the child's spine and kidneys were affected?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My love, you intimated it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The idea! I never intimated anything of the kind."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, my dear, it hasn't been two minutes since you said&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Very well, it shall be as you say. But there is a want of logic in your
+      last remark which&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, Mortimer, there's another! Little Georgi Gordon is taken."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Membranous croup?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Membranous croup."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is there any hope for him?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "None in the wide world. Oh, what is to become of us!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and she blanched again, poor thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p087.jpg (43K)" src="images/p087.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We then restored the crib and the nurse to the nursery and put up a bed
+      for ourselves in a room adjoining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What can make Baby sleep so?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, my darling, Baby always sleeps like a graven image."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I know. I know; but there's something peculiar about his sleep now. He
+      seems to&mdash;to&mdash;he seems to breathe so regularly. Oh, this is
+      dreadful."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But, my dear, he always breathes regularly."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "That is a good idea, but who will help you?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You can help me all I want. I wouldn't allow anybody to do anything but
+      myself, anyhow, at such a time as this."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Penelope coughed twice in her sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, why don't that doctor come! Mortimer, this room is too warm. This
+      room is certainly too warm. Turn off the register-quick!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Mortimer! Do you want to bring the judgment upon Baby, too!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she began to cry, but suddenly exclaimed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The doctor must have sent medicines!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Certainly. They are here. I was only waiting for you to give me a
+      chance."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said that while there was life there was hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Hope! Mortimer, you know no more what you are talking about than the
+      child unborn. If you would&mdash;As I live, the directions say give one
+      teaspoonful once an hour! Once an hour!&mdash;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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, my dear, a tablespoonful might&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Don't drive me frantic! . . . There, there, there, my precious, my own;
+      it's nasty bitter stuff, but it's good for Nelly&mdash;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&mdash;oh, I
+      know she can't live till morning! Mortimer, a tablespoonful every
+      half-hour will&mdash;Oh, the child needs belladonna, too; I know she does&mdash;and
+      aconite. Get them, Mortimer. Now do let me have my way. You know nothing
+      about these things."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Darling, is that register turned on?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I thought as much. Please turn it on at once. This room is cold."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned it on, and presently fell asleep again. I was aroused once more:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dearie, would you mind moving the crib to your side of the bed? It is
+      nearer the register."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Mortimer, if we only had some goose grease&mdash;will you ring?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now, Mortimer, why do you want to turn up the gas and wake up the child
+      again?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Because I want to see how much I am hurt, Caroline."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p090.jpg (45K)" src="images/p090.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, look at the chair, too&mdash;I have no doubt it is ruined. Poor
+      cat, suppose you had&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "On the mantelpiece in the nursery. If you'll step there and speak to
+      Maria&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fetched the goose grease and went to sleep again. Once more I was
+      called:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dragged myself out and lit the fire, and then sat down disconsolate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Mortimer, don't sit there and catch your death of cold. Come to bed."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I was stepping in she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But wait a moment. Please give the child some more of the medicine."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p091.jpg (41K)" src="images/p091.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is all over! All over! The child's perspiring! What shall we do?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, idiot! There is not a moment to lose! Go for the doctor. Go yourself.
+      Tell him he must come, dead or alive."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        [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.]
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="venture" id="venture"></a>MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1865]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p094.jpg (64K)" src="images/p094.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the "Burial of
+      Sir John Moore"&mdash;and a pretty crude parody it was, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously&mdash;not because
+      they had done anything to deserve, but merely because I thought it was my
+      duty to make the paper lively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next I gently touched up the newest stranger&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;l, he must select some other
+      medium than the columns of this journal!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much
+      attention as those playful trifles of mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="newark" id="newark"></a>HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1869]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p096.jpg (103K)" src="images/p096.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;never having seen any balm.)
+      You may remember that I lectured in Newark lately for the young gentlemen
+      of the&mdash;&mdash;-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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said: "Bring him to my lecture. I'll start him for you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, if you could but do it! If you could but do it, all our family would
+      bless you for evermore&mdash;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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;with
+      one wild burst of humor, and hurled a joke of supernatural atrocity full
+      at him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I sat down bewildered and exhausted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said: "I was trying to make that confounded old fool laugh, in the
+      second row."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he said: "Well, you were wasting your time, because he is deaf and
+      dumb, and as blind as a badger!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="bore" id="bore"></a>THE OFFICE BORE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1869]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p098.jpg (140K)" src="images/p098.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;for there are usually from two to
+      four on hand, day and night&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="greer" id="greer"></a>JOHNNY GREER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'No; but did you, though?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Yes.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Towed the carkiss ashore and saved it yo'self?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Yes.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Cracky! What did they give you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Nothing.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'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.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="beef" id="beef"></a>THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF
+      CONTRACT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1867]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p101.jpg (106K)" src="images/p101.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In as few words as possible I wish to lay before the nation what share,
+      howsoever small, I have had in this matter&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The origin of this distressful thing was this&mdash;and I assert here that
+      every fact in the following <i>r&eacute;sum&eacute;</i> can be amply
+      proved by the official records of the General Government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p102.jpg (36K)" src="images/p102.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE UNITED STATES
+    </h3>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          In account with JOHN WILSON MACKENZIE, of New Jersey,
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          deceased,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          Dr.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          $3,000
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To traveling expenses and transportation
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          14,000
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Total
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          $17,000
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Rec'd Pay't.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td></td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p103.jpg (35K)" src="images/p103.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said, "Well, sir, what can I do for you?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped me there, and dismissed me from his presence&mdash;kindly, but
+      firmly. The next day I called on the Secretary of State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said, "Well, sir?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "That will do, sir&mdash;that will do; this office has nothing to do with
+      contracts for beef."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said, "Your Imperial Highness, on or about the 10th day of October&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said, "Your August Excellency, on or about&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, that is all very well&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But, my dear sir&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said, "Most noble, grave, and reverend Signor, on or about the 10th day
+      of October, 1861, John Wilson Macken&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "That is sufficient, sir. I have heard of you. Go to the First Auditor of
+      the Treasury."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I stood there till I had changed four different times. Then I said to
+      one of the clerks who was reading:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Illustrious Vagrant, where is the Grand Turk?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What do you mean, sir? whom do you mean? If you mean the Chief of the
+      Bureau, he is out."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Will he visit the harem to-day?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Renowned and honored Imbecile: on or about&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You are the beef-contract man. Give me your papers."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took them, and for a long time he ransacked his odds and ends. Finally
+      he found the Northwest Passage, as I regarded it&mdash;he found the long
+      lost record of that beef contract&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Where is this John Wilson Mackenzie?" said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dead."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "When did he die?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "He didn't die at all&mdash;he was killed."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "How?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Tomahawked."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Who tomahawked him?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, an Indian, of course. You didn't suppose it was the superintendent
+      of a Sunday-school, did you?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No. An Indian, was it?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The same."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Name of the Indian?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "His name? I don't know his name."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Must have his name. Who saw the tomahawking done?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I don't know."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You were not present yourself, then?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Which you can see by my hair. I was absent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Then how do you know that Mackenzie is dead?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We must have proofs. Have you got the Indian?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Of course not."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, you must get him. Have you got the tomahawk?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I never thought of such a thing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "He didn't know anything about the genuineness of your claim."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why didn't the Second tell me? why didn't the Third? why didn't all those
+      divisions and departments tell me?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, certain death." It has been, to the most of our tribe. I begin to
+      feel that I, too, am called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Young man, you love the bright creature yonder with the gentle blue eyes
+      and the steel pens behind her ears&mdash;I see it in your soft glances;
+      you wish to marry her&mdash;but you are poor. Here, hold out your hand&mdash;here
+      is the beef contract; go, take her and be happy! Heaven bless you, my
+      children!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="fisher" id="fisher"></a>THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p109.jpg (114K)" src="images/p109.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> &mdash;[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&mdash;a fact
+        which was a long time in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last
+        and underwent Congressional investigation.]
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the same amounting to
+      $8,997.94. Total, $17,870.94.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. For an entire year the suffering Fisher family remained quiet&mdash;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&mdash;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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. Strange as it may seem, the Fishers let Congress alone for five years&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5. Therefore another interval of rest and silence ensued&mdash;an interval
+      which lasted four years&mdash;viz till 1858. The "right man in the right
+      place" was then Secretary of War&mdash;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&mdash;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:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;though
+      not according to the Congress of 1832.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;which property consisted of
+      (I quote from the printed United States Senate document):
+    </p>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          Dollars
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Corn at Bassett's Creek,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          3,000
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Cattle,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          5,000
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Stock hogs,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          1,050
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Drove hogs,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          1,204
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Wheat,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          350
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Hides,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          4,000
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Corn on the Alabama River,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          3,500
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Total,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          18,104
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td></td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the "full value of the property
+      destroyed by the troops."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p113.jpg (60K)" src="images/p113.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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):
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      The United States in account with the<br /> legal representatives of George
+      Fisher, deceased.
+    </h3>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          1813&mdash;
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          DOL
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 550 head of cattle, at 10 dollars,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          5,500
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 86 head of drove hogs,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          1,204
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 350 head of stock hogs,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          1,750
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT'S CREEK,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          6,000
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 8 barrels of whisky,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          350
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 2 barrels of brandy,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          280
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 1 barrel of rum,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          70
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To dry-goods and merchandise in store,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          1,100
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 35 acres of wheat,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          350
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 2,000 hides,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          4,000
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To furs and hats in store,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          600
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To crockery ware in store,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          100
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To smith's and carpenter's tools,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          250
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To houses burned and destroyed,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          600
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 4 dozen bottles of wine,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          48
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          1814&mdash;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To 120 acres of corn on Alabama River,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          9,500
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To crops of peas, fodder, etc
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          3,250
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Total,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          34,952
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To interest on $22,202, from July 1813
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          to November 1860, 47 years and 4 months,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          63,053.68
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To interest on $12,750, from September
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          1814 to November 1860, 46 years and 2 months,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          35,317.50
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Total,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          133,323.18
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td></td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="persecution" id="persecution"></a>DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A
+      BOY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;let us hear the testimony for
+      the defense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;probably
+      because the degraded Mongol is at no expense for whisky, and the refined
+      Celt cannot exist without it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in this way that he found out that a respectable number of the
+      tax-gatherers&mdash;it would be unkind to say all of them&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, there goes a Chinaman! God will not love me if I do not stone him."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;[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.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="spirited" id="spirited"></a>THE JUDGE'S "SPIRITED WOMAN"
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p121.jpg (64K)" src="images/p121.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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&mdash;Not
+      Guilty&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'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?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'The same,' says I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "That was spirited, I am willing to admit."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Wasn't it, though?" said the judge admiringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="information" id="information"></a>INFORMATION WANTED
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p123.jpg (136K)" src="images/p123.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"WASHINGTON,
+      December 10, 1867.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Could you give me any information respecting such islands, if any, as the
+      government is going to purchase?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="oldboys" id="oldboys"></a>SOME LEARNED FABLES,<br /> FOR GOOD OLD
+      BOYS AND GIRLS<br /> IN THREE PARTS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p126.jpg (111K)" src="images/p126.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      PART FIRST<br /> <br /> HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD SENT OUT A SCIENTIFIC
+      EXPEDITION
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You are hired to dig, sir&mdash;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&mdash;loafing
+      about here meddling with august matters of learning, when the other
+      laborers are pitching camp. Go along and help handle the baggage."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Professor Bull Frog (nephew of the late explorer) said he believed the
+      ridge was the wall that inclosed the earth. He continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Professor Snail adjusted his field-glass and examined the rampart
+      critically. Finally he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Profound mind!" said Professor Angle-Worm to Professor Field-Mouse;
+      "profound mind! nothing can long remain a mystery to that august brain."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every heart and every head was bowed, so awful, so sublime was the
+      magnitude of the discovery. Many shed tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p129.jpg (36K)" src="images/p129.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Give thanks for this stupendous thing which we have been permitted to
+      witness. It is the Vernal Equinox!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were shoutings and great rejoicings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But," said the Angle-Worm, uncoiling after reflection, "this is dead
+      summer-time."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Very well," said the Turtle, "we are far from our region; the season
+      differs with the difference of time between the two points."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, true. True enough. But it is night. How should the sun pass in the
+      night?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In these distant regions he doubtless passes always in the night at this
+      hour."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, doubtless that is true. But it being night, how is it that we could
+      see him?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was deemed satisfactory, and due entry was made of the decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Deliver your opinions, brethren, and then I will tell my thought&mdash;for
+      I think I have solved this problem."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Further discussion followed, and then the united voice of the commission
+      begged Lord Longlegs to speak. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But how is this? Venus should traverse the sun's surface, not the
+      earth's."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My friend has touched the marrow of our mighty discovery. Yes&mdash;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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The assembled wisdom sat in speechless adoration of this imperial
+      intellect. All doubts had instantly departed, like night before the
+      lightning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No more of this, sirrah Tumble-Bug! Say your say and then get you about
+      your business with speed! Quick&mdash;what is your errand? Come move off a
+      trifle; you smell like a stable; what have you been at?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;beg
+      pardon, your honors, what was that th('ic!) thing that ripped by here
+      first?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It was the Vernal Equinox."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Inf('ic!)fernal equinox. 'At's all right. D('ic !) Dunno him. What's
+      other one?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The transit of Venus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "G('ic !) Got me again. No matter. Las' one dropped something."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, indeed! Good luck! Good news! Quick what is it?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "M('ic!) Mosey out 'n' see. It'll pay."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No more votes were taken for four-and-twenty hours. Then the following
+      entry was made:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p133.jpg (37K)" src="images/p133.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p135.jpg (29K)" src="images/p135.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;which he did, furnishing the addition Anthem Singer, done
+      into the Mastodon tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And improved it, mayhap," muttered the Tumble-Bug, who was intruding
+      again, according to his idle custom and his unappeasable curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      END OF PART FIRST
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS<br /> PART SECOND<br /> HOW
+      THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD COMPLETED THEIR SCIENTIFIC LABORS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, take a walk!" said the chief of the expedition, with derision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p139.jpg (40K)" src="images/p139.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          THE AMERICAN HOTEL.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          MEALS AT ALL HOURS.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          THE SHADES.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          NO SMOKING.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          BOATS FOR HIRE CHEAP
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          UNION PRAYER MEETING, 4 P.M.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          BILLIARDS.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE WATERSIDE JOURNAL.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          THE A1 BARBER SHOP.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          TELEGRAPH OFFICE.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          TRY BRANDRETH'S PILLS.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          COTTAGES FOR RENT DURING
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE WATERING SEASON.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          FOR SALE CHEAP.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          FOR SALE CHEAP.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          FOR SALE CHEAP.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          FOR SALE CHEAP.
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td></td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p140.jpg (26K)" src="images/p140.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He observed that certain inscriptions were met with in greater frequency
+      than others. Such as "FOR SALE CHEAP"; "BILLIARDS"; "S. T.&mdash;1860&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally a cavern was discovered with these inscriptions upon it:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b><big>WATERSIDE MUSEUM.</big><br /> Open at All Hours.<br /> Admission 50
+      cents.<br /> <big>WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF<br /> WAX-WORKS, ANCIENT FOSSILS,<br />
+      ETC.</big><br /></b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'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&mdash;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.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;and even in
+      its legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p142.jpg (40K)" src="images/p142.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "'Jones, if you don't want to be discharged from the Musseum, make
+        the next primeaveal weppons more careful&mdash;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.&mdash;Varnum,
+        Manager.'
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "Back of the burial place was a mass of ashes, showing that Man always had
+      a feast at a funeral&mdash;else why the ashes in such a place; and
+      showing, also, that he believed in God and the immortality of the soul
+      &mdash;else why these solemn ceremonies?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      END OF PART SECOND
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p144.jpg (37K)" src="images/p144.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      PART THIRD
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Near the margin of the great river the scientists presently found a huge,
+      shapely stone, with this inscription:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "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!"
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "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."
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "True! true!" from everybody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A profound impression was produced by this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was interrupted by rude and derisive laughter&mdash;and the
+      Tumble-Bug appeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &eacute;clat 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p147.jpg (40K)" src="images/p147.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In truth it is believed by many that the lower animals reason and talk
+      together."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the great official report of the expedition appeared, the above
+      sentence bore this comment:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="senatorial" id="senatorial"></a>MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1867]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I thought you were worthy of confidence."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said, "Yes, sir."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt easier. "Oh, if that is all, sir, I did do that."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, you did. I will read your answer for your own humiliation:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24<br /> <br /> 'Messrs. Smith, Jones, and others.<br />
+        <br /> '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&mdash;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.<br /> <br /> 'Very truly, etc.,<br />
+        Mark Twain,<br /> <br /> 'For James W. N&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, U. S.
+        Senator.'
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, sir, I did not know I was doing any harm. I only wanted to convince
+      them."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24.<br /> <br /> "'Rev. John Halifax and others.<br />
+        <br /> "'GENTLEMEN: You will have to go to the state legislature about
+        that speculation of yours&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;you can't make it work. You can't issue stock on
+        an incorporation like that&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;that is what I
+        think about it. You close your petition with the words: "And we will
+        ever pray." I think you had better&mdash;you need to do it.<br /> <br />
+        "'Very truly, etc.,<br /> "'MARK TWAIN,<br /> <br /> "'For James W. N&mdash;&mdash;-,
+        U. S. Senator.'
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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&mdash;an ambiguous letter&mdash;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&mdash;any
+      shame&mdash;surely this letter you wrote, in obedience to that order,
+      ought to evoke it, when its words fall upon your ears:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> 'WASHINGTON, Nov. 27<br /> <br /> 'The Honorable Board of Aldermen,
+        etc.<br /> <br /> '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!<br /> <br /> 'What is
+        fame! Fame is an accident. Sir Isaac Newton discovered an apple falling
+        to the ground&mdash;a trivial discovery, truly, and one which a million
+        men had made before him&mdash;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.<br /> <br /> 'Poesy,
+        sweet poesy, who shall estimate what the world owes to thee!<br /> <br />
+        "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as<br /> snow&mdash;And
+        everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go."<br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        "Jack and Gill went up the hill<br /> To draw a pail of water;<br /> Jack
+        fell down and broke his crown,<br /> And Gill came tumbling after."
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <br /> '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
+        &mdash;to the field, to the nursery, to the guild. Especially should no
+        Board of Aldermen be without them.<br /> <br /> 'Venerable fossils! write
+        again. Nothing improves one so much as friendly correspondence. Write
+        again&mdash;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.<br /> <br /> 'Very truly,
+        etc.,<br /> "'MARK TWAIN,<br /> <br /> 'For James W. N&mdash;&mdash;-, U.
+        S. Senator.'
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "That is an atrocious, a ruinous epistle! Distraction!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, sir, I am really sorry if there is anything wrong about it&mdash;but&mdash;but
+      it appears to me to dodge the water-lot question."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dodge the mischief! Oh!&mdash;but never mind. As long as destruction must
+      come now, let it be complete. Let it be complete&mdash;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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> "'WASHINGTON, Nov. 30.<br /> <br /> "'Messers. Perkins, Wagner, et
+        at.<br /> <br /> "'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.<br />
+        <br /> "'Very truly, etc.,<br /> "'MARK TWAIN,<br /> <br /> "'For James W. N&mdash;&mdash;-,
+        U. S. Senator.'
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "There&mdash;now what do you think of that?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, I don't know, sir. It&mdash;well, it appears to me&mdash;to be
+      dubious enough."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Du&mdash;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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Leave the house! Leave it forever and forever, too."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="fashion" id="fashion"></a>A FASHION ITEM
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1867]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p153.jpg (136K)" src="images/p153.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At General G&mdash;&mdash;'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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="riley" id="riley"></a>RILEY&mdash;NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p154.jpg (100K)" src="images/p154.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the best men in Washington&mdash;or elsewhere&mdash;is RILEY,
+      correspondent of one of the great San Francisco dailies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, sure enough, at breakfast the landlady was down in the very sloughs
+      of woe&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, to think of it, only to think of it!&mdash;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!&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Put it, 'Well done, good and faithful servant,'" said Riley, and never
+      smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="oldman" id="oldman"></a>A FINE OLD MAN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p158.jpg (97K)" src="images/p158.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Wagner, the oldest man in Buffalo&mdash;one hundred and four years
+      old&mdash;recently walked a mile and a half in two weeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;which was a lie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His "second crop" of rich brown hair arrived from New York yesterday, and
+      he has a new set of teeth coming from&mdash;Philadelphia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is to be married next week to a girl one hundred and two years old, who
+      still takes in washing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They have been engaged eighty years, but their parents persistently
+      refused their consent until three days ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Wagner is two years older than the Rhode Island veteran, and yet has
+      never tasted a drop of liquor in his life&mdash;unless&mdash;unless you
+      count whisky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="science" id="science"></a>SCIENCE V.S. LUCK
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1867]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p159.jpg (54K)" src="images/p159.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that time, in Kentucky (said the Hon. Mr. K&mdash;&mdash;-); 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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;his clients could not be punished for indulging in what
+      some people chose to consider a game of chance until it was <i>proven</i>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What do you call it now?" said the judge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I call it a game of science!" retorted Sturgis; "and I'll prove it, too!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They saw his little game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Sturgis was on his feet in a second.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of the story can be told briefly. About daylight the jury came
+      in, and Deacon Job, the foreman, read the following:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> VERDICT:<br /> <br /> 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.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;&mdash;-.
+      "That verdict is of record, and holds good to this day."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="franklin" id="franklin"></a>THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1870]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p275.jpg (93K)" src="images/p275.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as
+      well."&mdash;B. F.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p276.jpg (29K)" src="images/p276.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not satisfied with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on
+      bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal-time&mdash;a thing which
+      has brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read
+      Franklin's pernicious biography.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;'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:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        Early to bed and early to rise<br /> Makes a man healthy and wealthy and
+        wise.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;as if it was any of his business. My grandfather
+      knew him well, and he says Franklin was always fixed&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p278.jpg (24K)" src="images/p278.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p279.jpg (85K)" src="images/p279.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p280.jpg (95K)" src="images/p280.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p281.jpg (69K)" src="images/p281.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p282.jpg (82K)" src="images/p282.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="bloke" id="bloke"></a>MR. BLOKE'S ITEM
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      [written about 1865]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p167.jpg (130K)" src="images/p167.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.&mdash;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.&mdash;'First Edition of the
+        Californian.'
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have read it again, and it does really seem a good deal more mixed than
+      ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p169.jpg (60K)" src="images/p169.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="medieval" id="medieval"></a>A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE [written about
+      1868]
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p171.jpg (95K)" src="images/p171.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER I.<br /> <br /> THE SECRET REVEALED.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My daughter!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,
+      answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Speak, father!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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?&mdash;for, woman of eight-and-twenty years&mdash;as you are, my
+      child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;Duke in act, though not
+      yet in name. Your servitors are ready&mdash;you journey forth to-night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Betake thee to the Duke, instantly! And beware how thou meddlest with my
+      purpose!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old baron sat silent for many minutes after his daughter's departure,
+      and then he turned to his sad wife and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My heart is full of bodings, yet all may still be well."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Tush, woman! Leave the owls to croak. To bed with ye, and dream of
+      Brandenburgh and grandeur!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER II.<br /> <br /> FESTIVITY AND TEARS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The villain Detzin is gone&mdash;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&mdash;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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER III.<br /> <br /> THE PLOT THICKENS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, why do you avoid me? What have I done&mdash;what have I said, to lose
+      your kind opinion of me&mdash;for surely I had it once? Conrad, do not
+      despise me, but pity a tortured heart? I cannot,&mdash;cannot hold the
+      words unspoken longer, lest they kill me&mdash;I LOVE YOU, CONRAD! There,
+      despise me if you must, but they would be uttered!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You relent! you relent! You can love me&mdash;you will love me! Oh, say
+      you will, my own, my worshipped Conrad!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By and by Constance rose slowly to her feet and moved away, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;did this
+      man&mdash;he spurned me from him like a dog!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER IV.<br /> <br /> THE AWFUL REVELATION
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The Lady Constance hath given birth to a child!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the lord of Klugenstein heard it, he swung his plumed helmet thrice
+      around his head and shouted:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Long live Duke Conrad!&mdash;for lo, his crown is sure from this day
+      forward! Detzin has done his errand well, and the good scoundrel shall be
+      rewarded!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER V.<br /> <br /> THE FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The saddest heart in all that great assemblage was in Conrad's breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the heralds had made due proclamation and the other preliminaries
+      had followed, the venerable Lord Chief justice said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Prisoner, stand forth!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unhappy princess rose, and stood unveiled before the vast multitude.
+      The Lord Chief Justice continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Not there, your Grace, not there! It is not lawful to pronounce judgment
+      upon any of the ducal line SAVE FROM THE DUCAL THRONE!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;save yourself while yet you
+      may. Name the father of your child!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A solemn hush fell upon the great court&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Thou art the man!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p178.jpg (128K)" src="images/p178.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole
+      business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers&mdash;or
+      else stay there. I thought it was going to be easy enough to straighten
+      out that little difficulty, but it looks different now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="petition" id="petition"></a>PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      TO THE HONORABLE THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN CONGRESS
+      ASSEMBLED
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <b>Whereas</b>, The Constitution guarantees equal rights to all, backed
+        by the Declaration of Independence; and
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <b>Whereas</b>, Under our laws, the right of property in real estate is
+        perpetual; and
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <b>Whereas</b>, Under our laws, the right of property in the literary
+        result of a citizen's intellectual labor is restricted to forty-two
+        years; and
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <b>Whereas</b>, Forty-two years seems an exceedingly just and righteous
+        term, and a sufficiently long one for the retention of property;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <b>Therefore</b>, 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.<br /> <br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        MARK TWAIN.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      A PARAGRAPH NOT ADDED TO THE PETITION
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="afterdinner" id="afterdinner"></a>AFTER-DINNER SPEECH
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [AT A FOURTH OF JULY GATHERING, IN LONDON, OF AMERICANS]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;common drinks, what is longer needful to the cementing
+      of the two nations together in a permanent bond of brotherhood?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is an age of progress, and ours is a progressive land. A great and
+      glorious land, too&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;and return the
+      basket." Now there couldn't be anything friendlier than that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        [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!"]
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="murderers" id="murderers"></a>LIONIZING MURDERERS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p182.jpg (135K)" src="images/p182.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had heard so much about the celebrated fortune-teller Madame&mdash;
+      &mdash;, 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&mdash;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&mdash;I knew
+      that as soon as she sighed. She looked at me searchingly for nearly a
+      minute, with her black eyes, and then said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is enough. Come!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She started down a very dark and dismal corridor&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is not worth while, madam. If you will heave another sigh, I think I
+      can follow it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Young man, summon your fortitude&mdash;do not tremble. I am about to
+      reveal the past."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Information concerning the future would be, in a general way, more&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Silence! You have had much trouble, some joy, some good fortune, some
+      bad. Your great grandfather was hanged."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "That is a l&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Silence! Hanged sir. But it was not his fault. He could not help it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I am glad you do him justice."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In view of this cheerful&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;all will be well&mdash;you will be hanged."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was now in tears. It seemed hard enough to go to Congress; but to be
+      hanged&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, man," she said, "hold up your head&mdash;you have nothing to grieve
+      about. Listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;[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&mdash;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.&mdash;"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."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You will live in New Hampshire. In your sharp need and distress the Brown
+      family will succor you&mdash;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&mdash;you will be converted just as soon as every effort to
+      compass pardon, commutation, or reprieve has failed&mdash;and then!&mdash;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 &eacute;clat, 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&mdash;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&mdash;will
+      weep over your remains&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p185.jpg (65K)" src="images/p185.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a bewept, bewailed, and sainted martyr&mdash;all in a month!
+      Fool!&mdash;so noble a fortune, and yet you sit here grieving!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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&mdash;you
+      would not deceive a stranger. But let the past be as it was, and let the
+      future be as it may&mdash;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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Not a shadow of a doubt!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Bless you, my benefactress!&mdash;excuse this embrace&mdash;you have
+      removed a great load from my breast. To be hanged in New Hampshire is
+      happiness&mdash;it leaves an honored name behind a man, and introduces him
+      at once into the best New Hampshire society in the other world."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="newcrime" id="newcrime"></a>A NEW CRIME
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      LEGISLATION NEEDED
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p187.jpg (139K)" src="images/p187.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world, and crime is dying
+      out. There are no longer any murders&mdash;none worth mentioning, at any
+      rate. Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against
+      insanity. There is where the true evil lies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="dream" id="dream"></a>A CURIOUS DREAM [Written about 1870.]
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      CONTAINING A MORAL
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p192.jpg (99K)" src="images/p192.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ease this down for a fellow, will you?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;chiefly from former
+      habit I judged, for I could not see that he brought away any perspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What is too bad, friend?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, everything, everything. I almost wish I never had died."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You surprise me. Why do you say this? Has anything gone wrong? What is
+      the matter?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Calm yourself, calm yourself," I said. "It is too bad&mdash;it is
+      certainly too bad, but then I had not supposed that you would much mind
+      such matters, situated as you are."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, my dear sir, I do mind them. My pride is hurt, and my comfort is
+      impaired&mdash;destroyed, I might say. I will state my case&mdash;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&mdash;so to speak&mdash;and in prominent contrast with
+      his distressful mood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Proceed," said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here, in
+      this street&mdash;there, now, I just expected that cartilage would let go!&mdash;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&mdash;to think of shredding out and going to pieces in this way,
+      just on account of the indifference and neglect of one's posterity!"&mdash;and
+      the poor ghost grated his teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a
+      shiver&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there, and was happy. For it
+      was out in the country then&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p195.jpg (45K)" src="images/p195.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You begin to comprehend&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;think a party by the name of Smith
+      took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder&mdash;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&mdash;and it
+      is a significant fact that he left when he saw me; and presently an old
+      woman from here missed her coffin&mdash;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&mdash;Anna Matilda
+      Hotchkiss&mdash;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&mdash;lost in a fight&mdash;has a kind of swagger in her gait
+      and a 'gallus' way of going with her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the
+      air&mdash;has been pretty free and easy, and is all damaged and battered
+      up till she looks like a queensware crate in ruins&mdash;maybe you have
+      met her?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p197.jpg (25K)" src="images/p197.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;for I would not deliberately speak discourteously
+      of a friend of yours. You were saying that you were robbed&mdash;and it
+      was a shame, too&mdash;but it appears by what is left of the shroud you
+      have on that it was a costly one in its day. How did&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, friend," said the poor skeleton, "the facts are just as I have given
+      them to you. Two of these old graveyards&mdash;the one that I resided in
+      and one further along&mdash;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&mdash;and that is no light matter
+      this rainy weather&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and all the more that there isn't a
+      compliment on it. It used to have:
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      'GONE TO HIS JUST REWARD'
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;died in '44&mdash;belongs to our set
+      in the cemetery&mdash;fine old family&mdash; great-grandmother was an
+      Injun&mdash;I am on the most familiar terms with him&mdash;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&mdash;shroud
+      cost four hundred dollars&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;no, don't mention it&mdash; 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&mdash;No? Well, just as you say, but I
+      wished to be fair and liberal&mdash;there's nothing mean about me.
+      Good-by, friend, I must be going. I may have a good way to go to-night&mdash;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&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a position
+      favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      NOTE.&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p201.jpg (23K)" src="images/p201.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="truestory" id="truestory"></a>A TRUE STORY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      REPEATED WORD FOR WORD AS I HEARD IT&mdash;[Written about 1876]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p202.jpg (118K)" src="images/p202.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Aunt Rachel, how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any
+      trouble?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Misto C&mdash;&mdash;, is you in 'arnest?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner and my speech, too.
+      I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, I thought&mdash;that is, I meant&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She faced fairly around now, and was full earnestness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Has I had any trouble? Misto C&mdash;&mdash;-, 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&mdash;dat's
+      my husban'&mdash;he was lovin' an' kind to me, jist as kind as you is to
+      yo' own wife. An' we had chil'en&mdash;seven chil'en&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aunt Rachel had gradually risen, while she warmed to her subject, and now
+      she towered above us, black against the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dey put chains on us an' put us on a stan' as high as dis po'ch&mdash;twenty
+      foot high&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, dah was my ole man gone, an' all my chil'en, all my seven chil'en&mdash;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.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;he's
+      a man!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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 <i>nuffin</i>
+      'bout dis. How was <i>I</i> gwyne to know it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, one night&mdash;it was a Friday night&mdash;dey comes a whole
+      platoon f'm a nigger ridgment da was on guard at de house&mdash;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!&mdash;rubbage!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p206.jpg (32K)" src="images/p206.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;jist as
+      I is now, plum to de ceilin', mos'&mdash;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!'&mdash;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&mdash;so,
+      lookin' like a gen'l&mdash;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.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;jist
+      so, same as if yo' foot was de stove&mdash;an' I'd opened de stove do' wid
+      my right han'&mdash;so, pushin' it back, jist as I pushes yo' foot&mdash;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&mdash;jist so, as I's
+      doin' to you&mdash;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!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh no' Misto C&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, I hain't had no trouble. An' no
+      joy!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p207.jpg (12K)" src="images/p207.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="twins" id="twins"></a>THE SIAMESE TWINS
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1868.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p208.jpg (88K)" src="images/p208.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;the just reward of faithfulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a moral in these solemn warnings&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could say more of an instructive nature about these interesting beings,
+      but let what I have written suffice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p212.jpg (13K)" src="images/p212.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="scottish" id="scottish"></a>SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN
+      LONDON
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1872.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;of the army, of the navy, of even royalty itself&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Woman! O woman!&mdash;er&mdash; Wom&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [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&mdash;so wild, so
+      regretful, so full of mournful retrospection. The lines run thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Alas!&mdash;alas!&mdash;a&mdash;alas! &mdash;&mdash;Alas!&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;alas!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;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&mdash;[laughter]&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, not because she conquered George III.&mdash;[laughter]&mdash;but
+      because she wrote those divine lines:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Let dogs delight to bark and bite, For God hath made them so."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [More laughter.] The story of the world is adorned with the names of
+      illustrious ones of our own sex&mdash;some of them sons of St. Andrew, too&mdash;Scott,
+      Bruce, Burns, the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis&mdash;[laughter]&mdash;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&mdash;the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Semiramis, Sairey
+      Gamp; the list is endless&mdash;[laughter]&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.]
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        &mdash;[* 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.]
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="ghost" id="ghost"></a>A GHOST STORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p215.jpg (117K)" src="images/p215.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;the step of an elephant, it seemed
+      to me&mdash;it was not like anything human. But it was moving from me&mdash;there
+      was relief in that. I heard it approach the door&mdash;pass out without
+      moving bolt or lock&mdash;and wander away among the dismal corridors,
+      straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it passed&mdash;and
+      then silence reigned once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself, "This is a dream&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear. I lay a long
+      time, peering into the darkness, and listening.&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;it seemed to pass to the door
+      and go out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All my misery vanished&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;Here, here, don't try to sit down in that thing&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him and down he went&mdash;I
+      never saw a chair shivered so in my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Stop, stop, you'll ruin ev&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved
+      into its original elements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was no use. Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed,
+      and it was a melancholy ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;you are big enough to know better."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;nothing
+      else can stand your weight&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p219.jpg (32K)" src="images/p219.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your
+      legs, that they are gouged up so?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Infernal chilblains&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired,
+      and spoke of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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!&mdash;
+      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&mdash;entirely fagged out.
+      Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This transcends everything! everything that ever did occur! Why you poor
+      blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing&mdash;you
+      have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself&mdash;the real Cardiff Giant
+      is in Albany!&mdash;[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,]&mdash;Confound it, don't you know your own remains?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation,
+      overspread a countenance before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Petrified Man rose slowly to his feet, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Honestly, is that true?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "As true as I am sitting here."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and
+      sorrier still that he had carried off my red blanket and my bath-tub.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="venus" id="venus"></a>THE CAPITOLINE VENUS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p222.jpg (121K)" src="images/p222.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Scene-An Artist's Studio in Rome.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, George, I do love you!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Bless your dear heart, Mary, I know that&mdash;why is your father so
+      obdurate?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "George, he means well, but art is folly to him&mdash;he only understands
+      groceries. He thinks you would starve me."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Confound his wisdom&mdash;it savors of inspiration. Why am I not a
+      money-making bowelless grocer, instead of a divinely gifted sculptor with
+      nothing to eat?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Do not despond, Georgy, dear&mdash;all his prejudices will fade away as
+      soon as you shall have acquired fifty thousand dol&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Fifty thousand demons! Child, I am in arrears for my board!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Scene-A Dwelling in Rome.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;I
+      believe you have nothing else to offer."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Bosh! What does that Arkansas ass know about it? Fame's nothing&mdash;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&mdash;otherwise
+      she marries young Simper. You have just six months to raise the money in.
+      Good morning, sir."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Alas! Woe is me!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [ Scene-The Studio.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, John, friend of my boyhood, I am the unhappiest of men."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You're a simpleton!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I have nothing left to love but my poor statue of America&mdash;and see,
+      even she has no sympathy for me in her cold marble countenance&mdash;so
+      beautiful and so heartless!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You're a dummy!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, John!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, fudge! Didn't you say you had six months to raise the money in?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Idiot! Coward! Baby! Six months to raise the money in&mdash;and five will
+      do!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Are you insane?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Six months&mdash;an abundance. Leave it to me. I'll raise it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What do you mean, John? How on earth can you raise such a monstrous sum
+      for me?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I am dizzy&mdash;bewildered&mdash;but I swear."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;another,
+      and part of an ear came away&mdash;another, and a row of toes was mangled
+      and dismembered&mdash;another, and the left leg, from the knee down, lay a
+      fragmentary ruin!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p224.jpg (40K)" src="images/p224.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John put on his hat and departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John returned presently with a carriage, got the broken-hearted artist and
+      the broken-legged statue aboard, and drove off, whistling low and
+      tranquilly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He left the artist at his lodgings, and drove off and disappeared down the
+      Via Quirinalis with the statue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Scene&mdash;The Studio.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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? &mdash;don't
+      mention it! My bootmaker duns me to death&mdash;my tailor duns me&mdash;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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, happiness attend your highness&mdash;Heaven be propitious to your
+      grace! I have brought my lord's new boots&mdash;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&mdash;ah, adieu!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;come in!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Pardon, signore, but I have brought your new suit of clothes for&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Come in!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "A thousand pardons for this intrusion, your worship. But I have prepared
+      the beautiful suite of rooms below for you&mdash;this wretched den is but
+      ill suited to&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Come in!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "COME IN!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My noble boy, she is yours! She'll be here in a moment! Take her&mdash;marry
+      her&mdash;love her&mdash;be happy!&mdash;God bless you both! Hip, hip, hur&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "COME IN!!!!!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, George, my own darling, we are saved!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, Mary, my own darling, we are saved&mdash;but I'll swear I don't know
+      why nor how!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Scene-A Roman Cafe.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of a group of American gentlemen reads and translates from the weekly
+      edition of 'Il Slangwhanger di Roma' as follows:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> WONDERFUL DISCOVERY&mdash;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.<br /> <br /> 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!
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Chorus of Voices.&mdash;"Luck! It's no name for it!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another Voice.&mdash;"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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All.&mdash;"Agreed."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAPTER VI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Scene&mdash;The Roman Capitol Ten Years Later.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p227.jpg (72K)" src="images/p227.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The worshiped, the illustrious Capitoline Venus&mdash;and what a sum she
+      is valued at! Ten millions of francs!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes&mdash;now she is."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And oh, Georgy, how divinely beautiful she is!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, yes but nothing to what she was before that blessed John Smith broke
+      her leg and battered her nose. Ingenious Smith!&mdash;gifted Smith!&mdash;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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE END
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        [NOTE.&mdash;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]
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="insurance" id="insurance"></a>SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      DELIVERED IN HARTFORD, AT A DINNER TO CORNELIUS WALFORD, OF LONDON
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      GENTLEMEN: I am glad, indeed, to assist in welcoming the distinguished
+      guest of this occasion to a city whose fame as an insurance center has
+      extended to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple band of
+      brothers working sweetly hand in hand&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance
+      line of business&mdash;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&mdash;as an
+      advertisement. I do not seem to care for poetry any more. I do not care
+      for politics&mdash;even agriculture does not excite me. But to me now
+      there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will remark here, by way of advertisement, that that noble charity which
+      we have named the HARTFORD ACCIDENT INSURANCE COMPANY&mdash;[The speaker
+      is a director of the company named.]&mdash;is an institution which is
+      peculiarly to be depended upon. A man is bound to prosper who gives it his
+      custom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;has a good steady income and a stylish suit of new
+      bandages every day, and travels around on a shutter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="chinaman" id="chinaman"></a>JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p231.jpg (145K)" src="images/p231.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Cheer up&mdash;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&mdash;you shall go back to China&mdash;you
+      shall see your friends again. What wages do they pay you here?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Divil a cint but four dollars a week and find meself; but it's aisy,
+      barrin' the troublesome furrin clothes that's so expinsive."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The exile remains at his post. The New York tea merchants who need
+      picturesque signs are not likely to run out of Chinamen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="agricultural" id="agricultural"></a>HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL
+      PAPER
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1870.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p233.jpg (115K)" src="images/p233.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put the paper on his lap, and while he polished his spectacles with his
+      handkerchief he said, "Are you the new editor?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said I was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Have you ever edited an agricultural paper before?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No," I said; "this is my first attempt."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Very likely. Have you had any experience in agriculture practically?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No; I believe I have not."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        "'Turnips should never be pulled, it injures them. It is much better to
+        send a boy up and let him shake the tree.'
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "Now, what do you think of that?&mdash;for I really suppose you wrote it?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Shake your grandmother! Turnips don't grow on trees!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There, you wrote that. Read it to me&mdash;quick! Relieve me. I suffer."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        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.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        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.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Now, as the warm weather approaches, and the ganders begin to spawn&mdash;
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      The excited listener sprang toward me to shake hands, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There, there&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p236.jpg (73K)" src="images/p236.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The editor was looking sad and perplexed and dejected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He surveyed the wreck which that old rioter and those two young farmers
+      had made, and then said "This is a sad business&mdash;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&mdash;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;&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I then left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="petrified" id="petrified"></a>THE PETRIFIED MAN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p239.jpg (125K)" src="images/p239.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.&mdash;&mdash;, 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
+      &mdash;&mdash; 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.&mdash;&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p240.jpg (28K)" src="images/p240.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.&mdash;&mdash;, "with that delicacy so characteristic of
+      him, forbade them, observing that it would be little less than sacrilege
+      to do such a thing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.&mdash;&mdash;'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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;&mdash;-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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p242.jpg (30K)" src="images/p242.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="massacre" id="massacre"></a>MY BLOODY MASSACRE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p243.jpg (123K)" src="images/p243.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &eacute;clat, and dropped dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy and
+      admiration of all beholders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p245.jpg (27K)" src="images/p245.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Jim, he b'iled his baby, and he took the old 'oman's skelp. Cuss'd if I
+      want any breakfast!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend
+      departed from the restaurant empty but satisfied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="undertaker" id="undertaker"></a>THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now that corpse," said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of
+      deceased approvingly, "was a brick&mdash;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&mdash;nothing else would
+      do. I couldn't get it. There warn't going to be time&mdash;anybody could
+      see that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;and so ca'm
+      and so cool. Jist a hunk of brains&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;didn't want any procession&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I never see a man snuffed out so sudden. Ah, it was a great loss&mdash;a
+      powerful loss to this poor little one-horse town. Well, well, well, I
+      hain't got time to be palavering along here&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;you hear me!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="chambermaids" id="chambermaids"></a>CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p250.jpg (92K)" src="images/p250.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against all chambermaids, of whatsoever age or nationality, I launch the
+      curse of bachelordom! Because:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If they cannot get the light in an inconvenient position any other way,
+      they move the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you want the spittoon in a certain spot, where it will be handy, they
+      don't, and so they move it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They do all the mean things they can think of, and they do them just out
+      of pure cussedness, and nothing else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chambermaids are dead to every human instinct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If I can get a bill through the legislature abolishing chambermaids, I
+      mean to do it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="aurelia" id="aurelia"></a>AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1865.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p253.jpg (89K)" src="images/p253.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The facts in the following case came to me by letter from a young lady who
+      lives in the beautiful city of San Jos&eacute;; 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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she extended the time once more, and he broke his other leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;she
+      still loves what is left of him&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="jenkins" id="jenkins"></a>"AFTER" JENKINS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A grand affair of a ball&mdash;the Pioneers'&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. W. M. was attired in an elegant 'p&acirc;t&eacute; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="barbers" id="barbers"></a>ABOUT BARBERS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p257.jpg (140K)" src="images/p257.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p259.jpg (23K)" src="images/p259.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last my turn came. A voice said "Next!" and I surrendered to&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p260.jpg (37K)" src="images/p260.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later. I am waiting
+      over a day for my revenge&mdash;I am going to attend his funeral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="ireland" id="ireland"></a>"PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p262.jpg (132K)" src="images/p262.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;informers get half.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What's that you say?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "To hell with!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "To hell with who? To hell with what?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, bedad, ye can finish it yourself&mdash;it's too expinsive for me!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think the seditious disposition, restrained by the economical instinct,
+      is finely put in that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="resignation" id="resignation"></a>THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT
+      RESIGNATION [Written about 1867]
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      WASHINGTON, December, 1867.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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&mdash;pleasure
+      excursions that are in reason&mdash;pleasure excursions that are
+      economical. Now, they might go down the Mississippi on a raft&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What will you have?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The question threw me off my guard. I said, "Rum punch."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said: "If you have got any business here, sir, state it&mdash;and in as
+      few words as possible."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;no heroes, no plot, no pictures&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 confr&egrave;res 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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, sir, who are you?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This is the meddlesome ass that came to recommend me to put poetry and
+      conundrums in my report, as if it were an almanac."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The President said it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Where have you been all day?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I observed that, if that was anybody's affair but my own, I had been to a
+      Cabinet meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "To a Cabinet meeting? I would like to know what business you had at a
+      Cabinet meeting?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said I went there to consult&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I had done the state some service, and I sent in my bill:
+    </p>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          The United States of America in account with
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          the Hon. Clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology,
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          Dr
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To consultation with Secretary of War
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          $50
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To consultation with Secretary of Navy
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          $50
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          $50
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Cabinet consultation
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          No charge
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To mileage to and from Jerusalem, via Egypt,
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          Algiers, Gibraltar, and Cadiz,
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          14,000 miles, at 20c. a mile
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          $2,800
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          To salary as Clerk of Senate Committee
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          on Conchology, six days, at $6 per day
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          $36
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Total
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          $2,986
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td></td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        &mdash;[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.]
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;but they
+      work. I know one who has to paste all sorts of little scraps from the
+      newspapers into a scrapbook&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;waiting
+      patiently for a chance to help their country out&mdash;and while they are
+      waiting, they only get barely two thousand dollars a year for it. It is
+      sad&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="history" id="history"></a>HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p271.jpg (103K)" src="images/p271.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How touching is this tribute of the late Hon. T. H. Benton to his mother's
+      influence:&mdash;'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
+      pious and correct wishes. When I was seven years of age she asked me not
+      to drink, and then I made a resolution of total abstinence; and that I
+      have adhered to it through all time I owe to my mother.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never saw anything so curious. It is almost an exact epitome of my own
+      moral career&mdash;after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother.
+      How well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco, good
+      old soul! She said, "You're at it again, are you, you whelp? Now don't
+      ever let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay
+      I'll blacksnake you within an inch of your life!" I have never touched it
+      at that hour of the morning from that time to the present day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She asked me not to gamble. She whispered and said, "Put up those wicked
+      cards this minute!&mdash;two pair and a jack, you numskull, and the other
+      fellow's got a flush!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never have gambled from that day to this&mdash;never once&mdash;without
+      a "cold deck" in my pocket. I cannot even tell who is going to lose in
+      games that are being played unless I deal myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a
+      resolution of total abstinence. That I have adhered to it and enjoyed the
+      beneficent effects of it through all time, I owe to my grandmother. I have
+      never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="curiosity" id="curiosity"></a>HONORED AS A CURIOSITY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p273.jpg (99K)" src="images/p273.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu, and experience
+      that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by
+      finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and
+      address him as "Captain." Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his
+      countenance that you are on the wrong track, ask him where he preaches. It
+      is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler. I
+      became personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six
+      missionaries. The captains and ministers form one-half of the population;
+      the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile foreigners
+      and their families; and the final fourth is made up of high officers of
+      the Hawaiian Government. And there are just about cats enough for three
+      apiece all around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs one day, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Good morning, your reverence. Preach in the stone church yonder, no
+      doubt!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No, I don't. I'm not a preacher."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Really, I beg your pardon, captain. I trust you had a good season. How
+      much oil&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oil! Why, what do you take me for? I'm not a whaler."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency. Major-General in the
+      household troops, no doubt? Minister of the Interior, likely? Secretary of
+      War? First Gentleman of the Bedchamber? Commissioner of the Royal&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Stuff, man! I'm not connected in any way with the government."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Bless my life! Then who the mischief are you? what the mischief are you?
+      and how the mischief did you get here? and where in thunder did you come
+      from?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I'm only a private personage&mdash;an unassuming stranger&mdash;lately
+      arrived from America."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No! Not a missionary! not a whaler! not a member of his Majesty's
+      government! not even a Secretary of the Navy! Ah! Heaven! it is too
+      blissful to be true, alas! I do but dream. And yet that noble, honest
+      countenance&mdash;those oblique, ingenuous eyes&mdash;that massive head,
+      incapable of&mdash;of anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif.
+      Excuse these tears. For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment
+      like this, and&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away. I pitied
+      this poor creature from the bottom of my heart. I was deeply moved. I shed
+      a few tears on him, and kissed him for his mother. I then took what small
+      change he had, and "shoved."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="ward" id="ward"></a>FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1870.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p283.jpg (107K)" src="images/p283.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had never seen him before. He brought letters of introduction from
+      mutual friends in San Francisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with him.
+      It was almost religion, there in the silver-mines, to precede such a meal
+      with whisky cocktails. Artemus, with the true cosmopolitan instinct,
+      always deferred to the customs of the country he was in, and so he ordered
+      three of those abominations. Hingston was present. I said I would rather
+      not drink a whisky cocktail. I said it would go right to my head, and
+      confuse me so that I would be in a helpless tangle in ten minutes. I did
+      not want to act like a lunatic before strangers. But Artemus gently
+      insisted, and I drank the treasonable mixture under protest, and felt all
+      the time that I was doing a thing I might be sorry for. In a minute or two
+      I began to imagine that my ideas were clouded. I waited in great anxiety
+      for the conversation to open, with a sort of vague hope that my
+      understanding would prove clear, after all, and my misgivings groundless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Artemus dropped an unimportant remark or two, and then assumed a look of
+      superhuman earnestness, and made the following astounding speech. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now there is one thing I ought to ask you about before I forget it. You
+      have been here in Silver land&mdash;here in Nevada&mdash;two or three
+      years, and, of course, your position on the daily press has made it
+      necessary for you to go down in the mines and examine them carefully in
+      detail, and therefore you know all about the silver-mining business. Now
+      what I want to get at is&mdash;is, well, the way the deposits of ore are
+      made, you know. For instance. Now, as I understand it, the vein which
+      contains the silver is sandwiched in between casings of granite, and runs
+      along the ground, and sticks up like a curb stone. Well, take a vein forty
+      feet thick, for example, or eighty, for that matter, or even a hundred&mdash;say
+      you go down on it with a shaft, straight down, you know, or with what you
+      call 'incline' maybe you go down five hundred feet, or maybe you don't go
+      down but two hundred&mdash;anyway, you go down, and all the time this vein
+      grows narrower, when the casings come nearer or approach each other, you
+      may say&mdash;that is, when they do approach, which, of course, they do
+      not always do, particularly in cases where the nature of the formation is
+      such that they stand apart wider than they otherwise would, and which
+      geology has failed to account for, although everything in that science
+      goes to prove that, all things being equal, it would if it did not, or
+      would not certainly if it did, and then, of course, they are. Do not you
+      think it is?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said to myself:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now I just knew how it would be&mdash;that whisky cocktail has done the
+      business for me; I don't understand any more than a clam."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then I said aloud:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I&mdash;I&mdash;that is&mdash;if you don't mind, would you&mdash;would
+      you say that over again? I ought&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, certainly, certainly! You see I am very unfamiliar with the subject,
+      and perhaps I don't present my case clearly, but I&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No, no-no, no-you state it plain enough, but that cocktail has muddled me
+      a little. But I will&mdash;no, I do understand for that matter; but I
+      would get the hang of it all the better if you went over it again&mdash;and
+      I'll pay better attention this time."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said, "Why, what I was after was this."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [Here he became even more fearfully impressive than ever, and emphasized
+      each particular point by checking it off on his finger-ends.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This vein, or lode, or ledge, or whatever you call it, runs along between
+      two layers of granite, just the same as if it were a sandwich. Very well.
+      Now suppose you go down on that, say a thousand feet, or maybe twelve
+      hundred (it don't really matter) before you drift, and then you start your
+      drifts, some of them across the ledge, and others along the length of it,
+      where the sulphurets&mdash;I believe they call them sulphurets, though why
+      they should, considering that, so far as I can see, the main dependence of
+      a miner does not so lie, as some suppose, but in which it cannot be
+      successfully maintained, wherein the same should not continue, while part
+      and parcel of the same ore not committed to either in the sense referred
+      to, whereas, under different circumstances, the most inexperienced among
+      us could not detect it if it were, or might overlook it if it did, or
+      scorn the very idea of such a thing, even though it were palpably
+      demonstrated as such. Am I not right?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said, sorrowfully: "I feel ashamed of myself, Mr. Ward. I know I ought
+      to understand you perfectly well, but you see that treacherous whisky
+      cocktail has got into my head, and now I cannot understand even the
+      simplest proposition. I told you how it would be."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, don't mind it, don't mind it; the fault was my own, no doubt&mdash;though
+      I did think it clear enough for&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Don't say a word. Clear! Why, you stated it as clear as the sun to
+      anybody but an abject idiot; but it's that confounded cocktail that has
+      played the mischief."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No; now don't say that. I'll begin it all over again, and&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Don't now&mdash;for goodness' sake, don't do anything of the kind,
+      because I tell you my head is in such a condition that I don't believe I
+      could understand the most trifling question a man could ask me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now don't you be afraid. I'll put it so plain this time that you can't
+      help but get the hang of it. We will begin at the very beginning."
+      [Leaning far across the table, with determined impressiveness wrought upon
+      his every feature, and fingers prepared to keep tally of each point
+      enumerated; and I, leaning forward with painful interest, resolved to
+      comprehend or perish.] "You know the vein, the ledge, the thing that
+      contains the metal, whereby it constitutes the medium between all other
+      forces, whether of present or remote agencies, so brought to bear in favor
+      of the former against the latter, or the latter against the former or all,
+      or both, or compromising the relative differences existing within the
+      radius whence culminate the several degrees of similarity to which&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said: "Oh, hang my wooden head, it ain't any use!&mdash;it ain't any use
+      to try&mdash;I can't understand anything. The plainer you get it the more
+      I can't get the hang of it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard a suspicious noise behind me, and turned in time to see Hingston
+      dodging behind a newspaper, and quaking with a gentle ecstasy of laughter.
+      I looked at Ward again, and he had thrown off his dread solemnity and was
+      laughing also. Then I saw that I had been sold&mdash;that I had been made
+      a victim of a swindle in the way of a string of plausibly worded sentences
+      that didn't mean anything under the sun. Artemus Ward was one of the best
+      fellows in the world, and one of the most companionable. It has been said
+      that he was not fluent in conversation, but, with the above experience in
+      my mind, I differ.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="cannibalism" id="cannibalism"></a>CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1867.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p287.jpg (128K)" src="images/p287.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way West, after changing cars at
+      Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about
+      forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat
+      down beside me. We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an
+      hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining.
+      When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask
+      questions about various public men, and about Congressional affairs; and I
+      saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly
+      familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capital, even to
+      the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and
+      Representatives in the Chambers of the national Legislature. Presently two
+      men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Harris, if you'll do that for me, I'll never forget you, my boy."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My new comrade's eye lighted pleasantly. The words had touched upon a
+      happy memory, I thought. Then his face settled into thoughtfulness&mdash;almost
+      into gloom. He turned to me and said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Let me tell you a story; let me give you a secret chapter of my life&mdash;a
+      chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events transpired.
+      Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt me."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure,
+      speaking sometimes with animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always
+      with feeling and earnestness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE STRANGER'S NARRATIVE
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      "On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening
+      train bound for Chicago. There were only twenty-four passengers, all told.
+      There were no ladies and no children. We were in excellent spirits, and
+      pleasant acquaintanceships were soon formed. The journey bade fair to be a
+      happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had even the vaguest
+      presentiment of the horrors we were soon to undergo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "At 11 P.M. it began to snow hard. Shortly after leaving the small village
+      of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that stretches
+      its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward the Jubilee
+      Settlements. The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills, or even vagrant
+      rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving the falling snow
+      before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy sea. The snow was
+      deepening fast; and we knew, by the diminished speed of the train, that
+      the engine was plowing through it with steadily increasing difficulty.
+      Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes, in the midst of great
+      drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves across the track.
+      Conversation began to flag. Cheerfulness gave place to grave concern. The
+      possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on the bleak prairie, fifty
+      miles from any house, presented itself to every mind, and extended its
+      depressing influence over every spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "At two o'clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by
+      the ceasing of all motion about me. The appalling truth flashed upon me
+      instantly&mdash;we were captives in a snow-drift! 'All hands to the
+      rescue!' Every man sprang to obey. Out into the wild night, the pitchy
+      darkness, the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the
+      consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all.
+      Shovels, hands, boards&mdash;anything, everything that could displace
+      snow, was brought into instant requisition. It was a weird picture, that
+      small company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the
+      blackest shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotive's reflector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "One short hour sufficed to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts.
+      The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away.
+      And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand charge the
+      engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the
+      driving-wheel! With a free track before us we should still have been
+      helpless. We entered the car wearied with labor, and very sorrowful. We
+      gathered about the stoves, and gravely canvassed our situation. We had no
+      provisions whatever&mdash;in this lay our chief distress. We could not
+      freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender. This was our
+      only comfort. The discussion ended at last in accepting the disheartening
+      decision of the conductor, viz., that it would be death for any man to
+      attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that. We could not
+      send for help, and even if we could it would not come. We must submit, and
+      await, as patiently as we might, succor or starvation! I think the
+      stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words were uttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there
+      about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the
+      blast; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled
+      themselves among the flickering shadows to think&mdash;to forget the
+      present, if they could&mdash;to sleep, if they might.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The eternal night&mdash;it surely seemed eternal to us&mdash;wore its
+      lagging hours away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east. As
+      the light grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of
+      life, one after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from
+      his forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out of the
+      windows upon the cheerless prospect. It was cheer less, indeed!&mdash;not
+      a living thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a
+      vast white desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither
+      before the wind&mdash;a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament
+      above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much. Another
+      lingering dreary night&mdash;and hunger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Another dawning&mdash;another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger,
+      hopeless watching for succor that could not come. A night of restless
+      slumber, filled with dreams of feasting&mdash;wakings distressed with the
+      gnawings of hunger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The fourth day came and went&mdash;and the fifth! Five days of dreadful
+      imprisonment! A savage hunger looked out at every eye. There was in it a
+      sign of awful import&mdash;the foreshadowing of a something that was
+      vaguely shaping itself in every heart&mdash;a something which no tongue
+      dared yet to frame into words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The sixth day passed&mdash;the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard
+      and hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death. It
+      must out now! That thing which had been growing up in every heart was
+      ready to leap from every lip at last! Nature had been taxed to the utmost&mdash;she
+      must yield. RICHARD H. GASTON of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous, and pale,
+      rose up. All knew what was coming. All prepared&mdash;every emotion, every
+      semblance of excitement&mdash;was smothered&mdash;only a calm, thoughtful
+      seriousness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Gentlemen: It cannot be delayed longer! The time is at hand! We must
+      determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. JOHN J. WILLIAMS of Illinois rose and said: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I
+      nominate the Rev. James Sawyer of Tennessee.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. Wm. R. ADAMS of Indiana said: 'I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote of New
+      York.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. CHARLES J. LANGDON: 'I nominate Mr. Samuel A. Bowen of St. Louis.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. SLOTE: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A.
+      Van Nostrand, Jun., of New Jersey.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. GASTON: 'If there be no objection, the gentleman's desire will be
+      acceded to.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. VAN NOSTRAND objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected.
+      The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and
+      refused upon the same grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. A. L. BASCOM of Ohio: 'I move that the nominations now close, and
+      that the House proceed to an election by ballot.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. SAWYER: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I protest earnestly against these
+      proceedings. They are, in every way, irregular and unbecoming. I must beg
+      to move that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the
+      meeting and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the
+      business before us understandingly.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. BELL of Iowa: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I object. This is no time to stand
+      upon forms and ceremonious observances. For more than seven days we have
+      been without food. Every moment we lose in idle discussion increases our
+      distress. I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made&mdash;every
+      gentleman present is, I believe&mdash;and I, for one, do not see why we
+      should not proceed at once to elect one or more of them. I wish to offer a
+      resolution&mdash;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. GASTON: 'It would be objected to, and have to lie over one day under
+      the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid. The
+      gentleman from New Jersey&mdash;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. VAN NOSTRAND: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I am a stranger among you; I have not
+      sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a
+      delicacy&mdash;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. MORGAN Of Alabama (interrupting): 'I move the previous question.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course. The
+      motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen
+      chairman, Mr. Blake, secretary, Messrs. Holcomb, Dyer, and Baldwin a
+      committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the
+      committee in making selections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucusing
+      followed. At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the
+      committee reported in favor of Messrs. George Ferguson of Kentucky, Lucien
+      Herrman of Louisiana, and W. Messick of Colorado as candidates. The report
+      was accepted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. ROGERS of Missouri: 'Mr. President&mdash;The report being properly
+      before the House now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of
+      Mr. Herrman that of Mr. Lucius Harris of St. Louis, who is well and
+      honorably known to us all. I do not wish to be understood as casting the
+      least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentleman
+      from Louisiana&mdash;far from it. I respect and esteem him as much as any
+      gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us can be blind to the
+      fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here
+      than any among us&mdash;none of us can be blind to the fact that the
+      committee has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or a
+      graver fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however
+      pure his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him&mdash;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "THE CHAIR: 'The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat. The Chair
+      cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned save by the
+      regular course, under the rules. What action will the House take upon the
+      gentleman's motion?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. HALLIDAY of Virginia: 'I move to further amend the report by
+      substituting Mr. Harvey Davis of Oregon for Mr. Messick. It may be urged
+      by gentlemen that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have
+      rendered Mr. Davis tough; but, gentlemen, is this a time to cavil at
+      toughness? Is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles? Is this a
+      time to dispute about matters of paltry significance? No, gentlemen, bulk
+      is what we desire&mdash;substance, weight, bulk&mdash;these are the
+      supreme requisites now&mdash;not talent, not genius, not education. I
+      insist upon my motion.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. MORGAN (excitedly): 'Mr. Chairman&mdash;I do most strenuously object
+      to this amendment. The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is
+      bulky only in bone&mdash;not in flesh. I ask the gentleman from Virginia
+      if it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance? if he would delude us
+      with shadows? if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonian specter? I
+      ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can gaze
+      into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant
+      hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us? I ask him if
+      he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark
+      future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this
+      tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from
+      Oregon's inhospitable shores? Never!' [Applause.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery debate, and lost. Mr. Harris
+      was substituted on the first amendment. The balloting then began. Five
+      ballots were held without a choice. On the sixth, Mr. Harris was elected,
+      all voting for him but himself. It was then moved that his election should
+      be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in consequence of his again
+      voting against himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "MR. RADWAY moved that the House now take up the remaining candidates, and
+      go into an election for breakfast. This was carried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "On the first ballot there was a tie, half the members favoring one
+      candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account
+      of his superior size. The President gave the casting vote for the latter,
+      Mr. Messick. This decision created considerable dissatisfaction among the
+      friends of Mr. Ferguson, the defeated candidate, and there was some talk
+      of demanding a new ballot; but in the midst of it a motion to adjourn was
+      carried, and the meeting broke up at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson
+      faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then,
+      when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr.
+      Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car-seats, and sat down
+      with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our
+      vision for seven torturing days. How changed we were from what we had been
+      a few short hours before! Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger, feverish
+      anxiety, desperation, then; thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep for
+      utterance now. That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful life. The
+      winds howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison house, but they
+      were powerless to distress us any more. I liked Harris. He might have been
+      better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man ever agreed with me
+      better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree of satisfaction.
+      Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored, but for genuine
+      nutritiousness and delicacy of fiber, give me Harris. Messick had his good
+      points&mdash;I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish to do it&mdash;but
+      he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be, sir&mdash;not a
+      bit. Lean?&mdash;why, bless me!&mdash;and tough? Ah, he was very tough!
+      You could not imagine it&mdash;you could never imagine anything like it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Do you mean to tell me that&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Do not interrupt me, please. After breakfast we elected a man by the name
+      of Walker, from Detroit, for supper. He was very good. I wrote his wife so
+      afterward. He was worthy of all praise. I shall always remember Walker. He
+      was a little rare, but very good. And then the next morning we had Morgan
+      of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to&mdash;handsome,
+      educated, refined, spoke several languages fluently&mdash;a perfect
+      gentleman&mdash;he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy. For
+      supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud, there is no
+      question about it&mdash;old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture the
+      reality. I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I will
+      wait for another election. And Grimes of Illinois said, 'Gentlemen, I will
+      wait also. When you elect a man that has something to recommend him, I
+      shall be glad to join you again.' It soon became evident that there was
+      general dissatisfaction with Davis of Oregon, and so, to preserve the good
+      will that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had Harris, an election
+      was called, and the result of it was that Baker of Georgia was chosen. He
+      was splendid! Well, well&mdash;after that we had Doolittle, and Hawkins,
+      and McElroy (there was some complaint about McElroy, because he was
+      uncommonly short and thin), and Penrod, and two Smiths, and Bailey (Bailey
+      had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he was otherwise good), and an
+      Indian boy, and an organ-grinder, and a gentleman by the name of
+      Buckminster&mdash;a poor stick of a vagabond that wasn't any good for
+      company and no account for breakfast. We were glad we got him elected
+      before relief came."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And so the blessed relief did come at last?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election. John Murphy
+      was the choice, and there never was a better, I am willing to testify; but
+      John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to succor us, and
+      lived to marry the widow Harris&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Relict of&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Relict of our first choice. He married her, and is happy and respected
+      and prosperous yet. Ah, it was like a novel, sir&mdash;it was like a
+      romance. This is my stopping-place, sir; I must bid you goodby. Any time
+      that you can make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be
+      glad to have you. I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you.
+      I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir. Good day, sir,
+      and a pleasant journey."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was gone. I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my
+      life. But in my soul I was glad he was gone. With all his gentleness of
+      manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye
+      upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and
+      that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly
+      stood still!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was bewildered beyond description. I did not doubt his word; I could not
+      question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness of
+      truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my
+      thoughts into hopeless confusion. I saw the conductor looking at me. I
+      said, "Who is that man?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "He was a member of Congress once, and a good one. But he got caught in a
+      snow-drift in the cars, and like to have been starved to death. He got so
+      frost-bitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of something to
+      eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three months afterward.
+      He is all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when he gets on that old
+      subject he never stops till he has eat up that whole car-load of people he
+      talks about. He would have finished the crowd by this time, only he had to
+      get out here. He has got their names as pat as A B C. When he gets them
+      all eat up but himself, he always says: 'Then the hour for the usual
+      election for breakfast having arrived, and there being no opposition, I
+      was duly elected, after which, there being no objections offered, I
+      resigned. Thus I am here.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to
+      the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a
+      bloodthirsty cannibal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="caesar" id="caesar"></a>THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1865.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p162.jpg (129K)" src="images/p162.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being the only true and reliable account ever published; taken from the
+      Roman "Daily Evening Fasces," of the date of that tremendous occurrence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfaction as
+      gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder and writing
+      them up with aggravating circumstantiality. He takes a living delight in
+      this labor of love&mdash;for such it is to him, especially if he knows
+      that all the other papers have gone to press, and his will be the only one
+      that will contain the dreadful intelligence. A feeling of regret has often
+      come over me that I was not reporting in Rome when Caesar was killed&mdash;reporting
+      on an evening paper, and the only one in the city, and getting at least
+      twelve hours ahead of the morning-paper boys with this most magnificent
+      "item" that ever fell to the lot of the craft. Other events have happened
+      as startling as this, but none that possessed so peculiarly all the
+      characteristics of the favorite "item" of the present day, magnified into
+      grandeur and sublimity by the high rank, fame, and social and political
+      standing of the actors in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, as I was not permitted to report Caesar's assassination in the
+      regular way, it has at least afforded me rare satisfaction to translate
+      the following able account of it from the original Latin of the Roman
+      Daily Evening Fasces of that date&mdash;second edition:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> Our usually quiet city of Rome was thrown into a state of wild
+        excitement yesterday by the occurrence of one of those bloody affrays
+        which sicken the heart and fill the soul with fear, while they inspire
+        all thinking men with forebodings for the future of a city where human
+        life is held so cheaply and the gravest laws are so openly set at
+        defiance. As the result of that affray, it is our painful duty, as
+        public journalists, to record the death of one of our most esteemed
+        citizens&mdash;a man whose name is known wherever this paper circulates,
+        and whose fame it has been our pleasure and our privilege to extend, and
+        also to protect from the tongue of slander and falsehood, to the best of
+        our poor ability. We refer to Mr. J. Caesar, the Emperor-elect.<br />
+        <br /> The facts of the case, as nearly as our reporter could determine
+        them from the conflicting statements of eye-witnesses, were about as
+        follows:&mdash;The affair was an election row, of course. Nine-tenths of
+        the ghastly butcheries that disgrace the city nowadays grow out of the
+        bickerings and jealousies and animosities engendered by these accursed
+        elections. Rome would be the gainer by it if her very constables were
+        elected to serve a century; for in our experience we have never even
+        been able to choose a dog-pelter without celebrating the event with a
+        dozen knockdowns and a general cramming of the station-house with
+        drunken vagabonds overnight. It is said that when the immense majority
+        for Caesar at the polls in the market was declared the other day, and
+        the crown was offered to that gentleman, even his amazing unselfishness
+        in refusing it three times was not sufficient to save him from the
+        whispered insults of such men as Casca, of the Tenth Ward, and other
+        hirelings of the disappointed candidate, hailing mostly from the
+        Eleventh and Thirteenth and other outside districts, who were overheard
+        speaking ironically and contemptuously of Mr. Caesar's conduct upon that
+        occasion.<br /> <br /> We are further informed that there are many among
+        us who think they are justified in believing that the assassination of
+        Julius Caesar was a put-up thing&mdash;a cut-and-dried arrangement,
+        hatched by Marcus Brutus and a lot of his hired roughs, and carried out
+        only too faithfully according to the program. Whether there be good
+        grounds for this suspicion or not, we leave to the people to judge for
+        themselves, only asking that they will read the following account of the
+        sad occurrence carefully and dispassionately before they render that
+        judgment.<br /> <br /> The Senate was already in session, and Caesar was
+        coming down the street toward the capitol, conversing with some personal
+        friends, and followed, as usual, by a large number of citizens. Just as
+        he was passing in front of Demosthenes and Thucydides' drug store, he
+        was observing casually to a gentleman, who, our informant thinks, is a
+        fortune-teller, that the Ides of March were come. The reply was, "Yes,
+        they are come, but not gone yet." At this moment Artexnidorus stepped up
+        and passed the time of day, and asked Caesar to read a schedule or a
+        tract or something of the kind, which he had brought for his perusal.
+        Mr. Decius Brutus also said something about an "humble suit" which he
+        wanted read. Artexnidorus begged that attention might be paid to his
+        first, because it was of personal consequence to Caesar. The latter
+        replied that what concerned himself should be read last, or words to
+        that effect. Artemidorus begged and beseeched him to read the paper
+        instantly!&mdash;[Mark that: It is hinted by William Shakespeare, who
+        saw the beginning and the end of the unfortunate affray, that this
+        "schedule" was simply a note discovering to Caesar that a plot was
+        brewing to take his life.]&mdash;However, Caesar shook him off, and
+        refused to read any petition in the street. He then entered the capitol,
+        and the crowd followed him.<br /> <br /> About this time the following
+        conversation was overheard, and we consider that, taken in connection
+        with the events which succeeded it, it bears an appalling significance:
+        Mr. Papilius Lena remarked to George W. Cassius (commonly known as the
+        "Nobby Boy of the Third Ward"), a bruiser in the pay of the Opposition,
+        that he hoped his enterprise to-day might thrive; and when Cassius asked
+        "What enterprise?" he only closed his left eye temporarily and said with
+        simulated indifference, "Fare you well," and sauntered toward Caesar.
+        Marcus Brutus, who is suspected of being the ringleader of the band that
+        killed Caesar, asked what it was that Lena had said. Cassius told him,
+        and added in a low tone, "I fear our purpose is discovered."<br /> <br />
+        Brutus told his wretched accomplice to keep an eye on Lena, and a moment
+        after Cassius urged that lean and hungry vagrant, Casca, whose
+        reputation here is none of the best, to be sudden, for he feared
+        prevention. He then turned to Brutus, apparently much excited, and asked
+        what should be done, and swore that either he or Caesar would never turn
+        back&mdash;he would kill himself first. At this time Caesar was talking
+        to some of the back-country members about the approaching fall
+        elections, and paying little attention to what was going on around him.
+        Billy Trebonius got into conversation with the people's friend and
+        Caesar's&mdash;Mark Antony&mdash;and under some pretense or other got
+        him away, and Brutus, Decius, Casca, Cinna, Metellus Cimber, and others
+        of the gang of infamous desperadoes that infest Rome at present, closed
+        around the doomed Caesar. Then Metellus Cimber knelt down and begged
+        that his brother might be recalled from banishment, but Caesar rebuked
+        him for his fawning conduct, and refused to grant his petition.
+        Immediately, at Cimber's request, first Brutus and then Cassias begged
+        for the return of the banished Publius; but Caesar still refused. He
+        said he could not be moved; that he was as fixed as the North Star, and
+        proceeded to speak in the most complimentary terms of the firmness of
+        that star and its steady character. Then he said he was like it, and he
+        believed he was the only man in the country that was; therefore, since
+        he was "constant" that Cimber should be banished, he was also "constant"
+        that he should stay banished, and he'd be hanged if he didn't keep him
+        so!<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+      </p>
+      <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+        <img alt="p164.jpg (79K)" src="images/p164.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+      </div>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Instantly seizing upon this shallow
+        pretext for a fight, Casca sprang at Caesar and struck him with a dirk,
+        Caesar grabbing him by the arm with his right hand, and launching a blow
+        straight from the shoulder with his left, that sent the reptile bleeding
+        to the earth. He then backed up against Pompey's statue, and squared
+        himself to receive his assailants. Cassias and Cimber and Cinna rushed
+        upon him with their daggers drawn, and the former succeeded in
+        inflicting a wound upon his body; but before he could strike again, and
+        before either of the others could strike at all, Caesar stretched the
+        three miscreants at his feet with as many blows of his powerful fist. By
+        this time the Senate was in an indescribable uproar; the throng of
+        citizens in the lobbies had blockaded the doors in their frantic efforts
+        to escape from the building, the sergeant-at-arms and his assistants
+        were struggling with the assassins, venerable senators had cast aside
+        their encumbering robes, and were leaping over benches and flying down
+        the aisles in wild confusion toward the shelter of the committee-rooms,
+        and a thousand voices were shouting "Po-lice! Po-lice!" in discordant
+        tones that rose above the frightful din like shrieking winds above the
+        roaring of a tempest. And amid it all great Caesar stood with his back
+        against the statue, like a lion at bay, and fought his assailants
+        weaponless and hand to hand, with the defiant bearing and the unwavering
+        courage which he had shown before on many a bloody field. Billy
+        Trebonius and Caius Legarius struck him with their daggers and fell, as
+        their brother-conspirators before them had fallen. But at last, when
+        Caesar saw his old friend Brutus step forward armed with a murderous
+        knife, it is said he seemed utterly overpowered with grief and
+        amazement, and, dropping his invincible left arm by his side, he hid his
+        face in the folds of his mantle and received the treacherous blow
+        without an effort to stay the hand that gave it. He only said, "Et tu,
+        Brute?" and fell lifeless on the marble pavement.<br /> <br /> We learn
+        that the coat deceased had on when he was killed was the same one he
+        wore in his tent on the afternoon of the day he overcame the Nervii, and
+        that when it was removed from the corpse it was found to be cut and
+        gashed in no less than seven different places. There was nothing in the
+        pockets. It will be exhibited at the coroner's inquest, and will be
+        damning proof of the fact of the killing. These latter facts may be
+        relied on, as we get them from Mark Antony, whose position enables him
+        to learn every item of news connected with the one subject of absorbing
+        interest of-to-day.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+      </p>
+      <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+        <img alt="p165.jpg (35K)" src="images/p165.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+      </div>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> LATER:&mdash;While the coroner was
+        summoning a jury, Mark Antony and other friends of the late Caesar got
+        hold of the body, and lugged it off to the Forum, and at last accounts
+        Antony and Brutus were making speeches over it and raising such a row
+        among the people that, as we go to press, the chief of police is
+        satisfied there is going to be a riot, and is taking measures
+        accordingly.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="widow" id="widow"></a>THE WIDOW'S PROTEST
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice (said the
+      banker's clerk) was there in Corning during the war. Dan Murphy enlisted
+      as a private, and fought very bravely. The boys all liked him, and when a
+      wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was too heavy
+      work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a sutler. He made
+      money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for him. She was a
+      washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to keep money when
+      she got it. She didn't waste a penny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the contrary, she began to get miserly as her bank-account grew. She
+      grieved to part with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working
+      life she had known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and
+      without a dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering
+      so again. Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their
+      esteem and respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she
+      would like to have him embalmed and sent home, when you know the usual
+      custom was to dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then
+      inform his friends what had become of him. Mrs. Murphy jumped to the
+      conclusion that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her dead
+      husband, and so she telegraphed "Yes." It was at the "wake" that the bill
+      for embalming arrived and was presented to the widow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She uttered a wild, sad wail that pierced every heart, and said,
+      "Sivinty-foive dollars for stooffin' Dan, blister their sowls! Did thim
+      divils suppose I was goin' to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such
+      expinsive curiassities!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="panoramist" id="panoramist"></a>THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1866.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p296.jpg (109K)" src="images/p296.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There was a fellow traveling around in that country," said Mr. Nickerson,
+      "with a moral-religious show&mdash;a sort of scriptural panorama&mdash;and
+      he hired a wooden-headed old slab to play the piano for him. After the
+      first night's performance the showman says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'My friend, you seem to know pretty much all the tunes there are, and you
+      worry along first rate. But then, didn't you notice that sometimes last
+      night the piece you happened to be playing was a little rough on the
+      proprieties, so to speak&mdash;didn't seem to jibe with the general gait
+      of the picture that was passing at the time, as it were&mdash;was a little
+      foreign to the subject, you know&mdash;as if you didn't either trump or
+      follow suit, you understand?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Well, no,' the fellow said; 'he hadn't noticed, but it might be; he had
+      played along just as it came handy.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "So they put it up that the simple old dummy was to keep his eye on the
+      panorama after that, and as soon as a stunning picture was reeled out he
+      was to fit it to a dot with a piece of music that would help the audience
+      to get the idea of the subject, and warm them up like a camp-meeting
+      revival. That sort of thing would corral their sympathies, the showman
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There was a big audience that night&mdash;mostly middle-aged and old
+      people who belong to the church, and took a strong interest in Bible
+      matters, and the balance were pretty much young bucks and heifers&mdash;they
+      always come out strong on panoramas, you know, because it gives them a
+      chance to taste one another's complexions in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, the showman began to swell himself up for his lecture, and the old
+      mud-jobber tackled the piano and ran his fingers up and down once or twice
+      to see that she was all right, and the fellows behind the curtain
+      commenced to grind out the panorama. The showman balanced his weight on
+      his right foot, and propped his hands over his hips, and flung his eyes
+      over his shoulder at the scenery, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Ladies and gentlemen, the painting now before you illustrates the
+      beautiful and touching parable of the Prodigal Son. Observe the happy
+      expression just breaking over the features of the poor, suffering youth&mdash;so
+      worn and weary with his long march; note also the ecstasy beaming from the
+      uplifted countenance of the aged father, and the joy that sparkles in the
+      eyes of the excited group of youths and maidens, and seems ready to burst
+      into the welcoming chorus from their lips. The lesson, my friends, is as
+      solemn and instructive as the story is tender and beautiful.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The mud-jobber was all ready, and when the second speech was finished,
+      struck up:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        "Oh, we'll all get blind drunk<br /> When Johnny comes marching home!
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "Some of the people giggled, and some groaned a little. The showman
+      couldn't say a word; he looked at the pianist sharp, but he was all lovely
+      and serene&mdash;he didn't know there was anything out of gear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The panorama moved on, and the showman drummed up his grit and started in
+      fresh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Ladies and gentlemen, the fine picture now unfolding itself to your gaze
+      exhibits one of the most notable events in Bible history&mdash;our Saviour
+      and His disciples upon the Sea of Galilee. How grand, how awe-inspiring
+      are the reflections which the subject invokes! What sublimity of faith is
+      revealed to us in this lesson from the sacred writings! The Saviour
+      rebukes the angry waves, and walks securely upon the bosom of the deep!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "All around the house they were whispering, 'Oh, how lovely, how
+      beautiful!' and the orchestra let himself out again:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        "A life on the ocean wave,<br /> And a home on the rolling deep!
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "There was a good deal of honest snickering turned on this time, and
+      considerable groaning, and one or two old deacons got up and went out. The
+      showman grated his teeth, and cursed the piano man to himself; but the
+      fellow sat there like a knot on a log, and seemed to think he was doing
+      first-rate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "After things got quiet the showman thought he would make one more stagger
+      at it, anyway, though his confidence was beginning to get mighty shaky.
+      The supes started the panorama grinding along again, and he says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Ladies and gentlemen, this exquisite painting represents the raising of
+      Lazarus from the dead by our Saviour. The subject has been handled with
+      marvelous skill by the artist, and such touching sweetness and tenderness
+      of expression has he thrown into it that I have known peculiarly sensitive
+      persons to be even affected to tears by looking at it. Observe the
+      half-confused, half-inquiring look upon the countenance of the awakened
+      Lazarus. Observe, also, the attitude and expression of the Saviour, who
+      takes him gently by the sleeve of his shroud with one hand, while He
+      points with the other toward the distant city.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Before anybody could get off an opinion in the case the innocent old ass
+      at the piano struck up:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        "Come rise up, William Ri-i-ley,<br /> And go along with me!
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      "Whe-ew! All the solemn old flats got up in a huff to go, and everybody
+      else laughed till the windows rattled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The showman went down and grabbed the orchestra and shook him up and
+      says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'That lets you out, you know, you chowder-headed old clam. Go to the
+      doorkeeper and get your money, and cut your stick&mdash;vamose the ranch!
+      Ladies and gentlemen, circumstances over which I have no control compel me
+      prematurely to dismiss the house.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="cold" id="cold"></a>CURING A COLD
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1864]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p300.jpg (138K)" src="images/p300.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a good thing, perhaps, to write for the amusement of the public, but
+      it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction, their
+      profit, their actual and tangible benefit. The latter is the sole object
+      of this article. If it prove the means of restoring to health one solitary
+      sufferer among my race, of lighting up once more the fire of hope and joy
+      in his faded eyes, of bringing back to his dead heart again the quick,
+      generous impulses of other days, I shall be amply rewarded for my labor;
+      my soul will be permeated with the sacred delight a Christian feels when
+      he has done a good, unselfish deed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having led a pure and blameless life, I am justified in believing that no
+      man who knows me will reject the suggestions I am about to make, out of
+      fear that I am trying to deceive him. Let the public do itself the honor
+      to read my experience in doctoring a cold, as herein set forth, and then
+      follow in my footsteps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the White House was burned in Virginia City, I lost my home, my
+      happiness, my constitution, and my trunk. The loss of the two first named
+      articles was a matter of no great consequence, since a home without a
+      mother, or a sister, or a distant young female relative in it, to remind
+      you, by putting your soiled linen out of sight and taking your boots down
+      off the mantelpiece, that there are those who think about you and care for
+      you, is easily obtained. And I cared nothing for the loss of my happiness,
+      because, not being a poet, it could not be possible that melancholy would
+      abide with me long. But to lose a good constitution and a better trunk
+      were serious misfortunes. On the day of the fire my constitution succumbed
+      to a severe cold, caused by undue exertion in getting ready to do
+      something. I suffered to no purpose, too, because the plan I was figuring
+      at for the extinguishing of the fire was so elaborate that I never got it
+      completed until the middle of the following week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first time I began to sneeze, a friend told me to go and bathe my feet
+      in hot water and go to bed. I did so. Shortly afterwards, another friend
+      advised me to get up and take a cold shower-bath. I did that also. Within
+      the hour, another friend assured me that it was policy to "feed a cold and
+      starve a fever." I had both. So I thought it best to fill myself up for
+      the cold, and then keep dark and let the fever starve awhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a case of this kind, I seldom do things by halves; I ate pretty
+      heartily; I conferred my custom upon a stranger who had just opened his
+      restaurant that morning; he waited near me in respectful silence until I
+      had finished feeding my cold, when he inquired if the people about
+      Virginia City were much afflicted with colds? I told him I thought they
+      were. He then went out and took in his sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I started down toward the office, and on the way encountered another bosom
+      friend, who told me that a quart of salt-water, taken warm, would come as
+      near curing a cold as anything in the world. I hardly thought I had room
+      for it, but I tried it anyhow. The result was surprising. I believed I had
+      thrown up my immortal soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, as I am giving my experience only for the benefit of those who are
+      troubled with the distemper I am writing about, I feel that they will see
+      the propriety of my cautioning them against following such portions of it
+      as proved inefficient with me, and acting upon this conviction, I warn
+      them against warm salt-water. It may be a good enough remedy, but I think
+      it is too severe. If I had another cold in the head, and there were no
+      course left me but to take either an earthquake or a quart of warm
+      saltwater, I would take my chances on the earthquake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the storm which had been raging in my stomach had subsided, and no
+      more good Samaritans happening along, I went on borrowing handkerchiefs
+      again and blowing them to atoms, as had been my custom in the early stages
+      of my cold, until I came across a lady who had just arrived from over the
+      plains, and who said she had lived in a part of the country where doctors
+      were scarce, and had from necessity acquired considerable skill in the
+      treatment of simple "family complaints." I knew she must have had much
+      experience, for she appeared to be a hundred and fifty years old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p302.jpg (32K)" src="images/p302.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She mixed a decoction composed of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and
+      various other drugs, and instructed me to take a wine-glass full of it
+      every fifteen minutes. I never took but one dose; that was enough; it
+      robbed me of all moral principle, and awoke every unworthy impulse of my
+      nature. Under its malign influence my brain conceived miracles of
+      meanness, but my hands were too feeble to execute them; at that time, had
+      it not been that my strength had surrendered to a succession of assaults
+      from infallible remedies for my cold, I am satisfied that I would have
+      tried to rob the graveyard. Like most other people, I often feel mean, and
+      act accordingly; but until I took that medicine I had never reveled in
+      such supernatural depravity, and felt proud of it. At the end of two days
+      I was ready to go to doctoring again. I took a few more unfailing
+      remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I got to coughing incessantly, and my voice fell below zero; I conversed
+      in a thundering bass, two octaves below my natural tone; I could only
+      compass my regular nightly repose by coughing myself down to a state of
+      utter exhaustion, and then the moment I began to talk in my sleep, my
+      discordant voice woke me up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My case grew more and more serious every day. A plain gin was recommended;
+      I took it. Then gin and molasses; I took that also. Then gin and onions; I
+      added the onions, and took all three. I detected no particular result,
+      however, except that I had acquired a breath like a buzzard's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I found I had to travel for my health. I went to Lake Bigler with my
+      reportorial comrade, Wilson. It is gratifying to me to reflect that we
+      traveled in considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my
+      friend took all his baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk
+      handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype of his grandmother. We sailed and hunted
+      and fished and danced all day, and I doctored my cough all night. By
+      managing in this way, I made out to improve every hour in the twenty-four.
+      But my disease continued to grow worse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sheet-bath was recommended. I had never refused a remedy yet, and it
+      seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a
+      sheet-bath, notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it was.
+      It was administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty. My
+      breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a thousand
+      yards of it) soaked in ice-water, was wound around me until I resembled a
+      swab for a Columbiad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a cruel expedient. When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh, it
+      makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men do
+      in the death-agony. It froze the marrow in my bones and stopped the
+      beating of my heart. I thought my time had come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p304.jpg (24K)" src="images/p304.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a
+      negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp, and
+      came near being drowned. He floundered around, though, and finally rose up
+      out of the water considerably strangled and furiously angry, and started
+      ashore at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with great
+      asperity, that "one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to get
+      killed wid jis' such damn foolishness as dis!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never take a sheet-bath&mdash;never. Next to meeting a lady acquaintance
+      who, for reasons best known to herself, don't see you when she looks at
+      you, and don't know you when she does see you, it is the most
+      uncomfortable thing in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, as I was saying, when the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough, a lady
+      friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my breast. I
+      believe that would have cured me effectually, if it had not been for young
+      Wilson. When I went to bed, I put my mustard plaster&mdash;which was a
+      very gorgeous one, eighteen inches square&mdash;where I could reach it
+      when I was ready for it. But young Wilson got hungry in the night, and&mdash;here
+      is food for the imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After sojourning a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and,
+      besides the steam-baths, I took a lot of the vilest medicines that were
+      ever concocted. They would have cured me, but I had to go back to Virginia
+      City, where, notwithstanding the variety of new remedies I absorbed every
+      day, I managed to aggravate my disease by carelessness and undue exposure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I finally concluded to visit San Francisco, and the first day I got there
+      a lady at the hotel told me to drink a quart of whisky every twenty-four
+      hours, and a friend up-town recommended precisely the same course. Each
+      advised me to take a quart; that made half a gallon. I did it, and still
+      live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, with the kindest motives in the world, I offer for the consideration
+      of consumptive patients the variegated course of treatment I have lately
+      gone through. Let them try it; if it don't cure, it can't more than kill
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p305.jpg (24K)" src="images/p305.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="excursion" id="excursion"></a>A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Published at the time of the "Comet Scare" in the summer of 1874]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p306.jpg (111K)" src="images/p306.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [We have received the following advertisement, but, inasmuch as it
+      concerns a matter of deep and general interest, we feel fully justified in
+      inserting it in our reading-columns. We are confident that our conduct in
+      this regard needs only explanation, not apology.&mdash;Ed., N. Y. Herald.]
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      ADVERTISEMENT
+    </h3>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> This is to inform the public that in connection with Mr. Barnum I
+        have leased the comet for a term of years; and I desire also to solicit
+        the public patronage in favor of a beneficial enterprise which we have
+        in view.<br /> <br /> We propose to fit up comfortable, and even
+        luxurious, accommodations in the comet for as many persons as will honor
+        us with their patronage, and make an extended excursion among the
+        heavenly bodies. We shall prepare 1,000,000 state-rooms in the tail of
+        the comet (with hot and cold water, gas, looking-glass, parachute,
+        umbrella, etc., in each), and shall construct more if we meet with a
+        sufficiently generous encouragement. We shall have billiard-rooms,
+        card-rooms, music-rooms, bowling-alleys and many spacious theaters and
+        free libraries; and on the main deck we propose to have a driving park,
+        with upward of 100,000 miles of roadway in it. We shall publish daily
+        newspapers also.<br /> <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        DEPARTURE OF THE COMET
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        The comet will leave New York at 10 P.M. on the 20th inst., and
+        therefore it will be desirable that the passengers be on board by eight
+        at the latest, to avoid confusion in getting under way. It is not known
+        whether passports will be necessary or not, but it is deemed best that
+        passengers provide them, and so guard against all contingencies. No dogs
+        will be allowed on board. This rule has been made in deference to the
+        existing state of feeling regarding these animals, and will be strictly
+        adhered to. The safety of the passengers will in all ways be jealously
+        looked to. A substantial iron railing will be put up all around the
+        comet, and no one will be allowed to go to the edge and look over unless
+        accompanied by either my partner or myself.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        THE POSTAL SERVICE
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        will be of the completest character. Of course the telegraph, and the
+        telegraph only, will be employed; consequently friends occupying
+        state-rooms 20,000,000 and even 30,000,000 miles apart will be able to
+        send a message and receive a reply inside of eleven days. Night messages
+        will be half-rate. The whole of this vast postal system will be under
+        the personal superintendence of Mr. Hale of Maine. Meals served at all
+        hours. Meals served in staterooms charged extra.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Hostility is not apprehended from any great planet, but we have thought
+        it best to err on the safe side, and therefore have provided a proper
+        number of mortars, siege-guns, and boarding-pikes. History shows that
+        small, isolated communities, such as the people of remote islands, are
+        prone to be hostile to strangers, and so the same may be the case with
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        THE INHABITANTS OF STARS
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        of the tenth or twentieth magnitude. We shall in no case wantonly offend
+        the people of any star, but shall treat all alike with urbanity and
+        kindliness, never conducting ourselves toward an asteroid after a
+        fashion which we could not venture to assume toward Jupiter or Saturn. I
+        repeat that we shall not wantonly offend any star; but at the same time
+        we shall promptly resent any injury that may be done us, or any
+        insolence offered us, by parties or governments residing in any star in
+        the firmament. Although averse to the shedding of blood, we shall still
+        hold this course rigidly and fearlessly, not only toward single stars,
+        but toward constellations. We shall hope to leave a good impression of
+        America behind us in every nation we visit, from Venus to Uranus. And,
+        at all events, if we cannot inspire love we shall at least compel
+        respect for our country wherever we go. We shall take with us, free of
+        charge,
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        A GREAT FORCE OF MISSIONARIES,
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        and shed the true light upon all the celestial orbs which, physically
+        aglow, are yet morally in darkness. Sunday-schools will be established
+        wherever practicable. Compulsory education will also be introduced.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The comet will visit Mars first, and proceed to Mercury, Jupiter, Venus,
+        and Saturn. Parties connected with the government of the District of
+        Columbia and with the former city government of New York, who may desire
+        to inspect the rings, will be allowed time and every facility. Every
+        star of prominent magnitude will be visited, and time allowed for
+        excursions to points of interest inland.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        THE DOG STAR
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        has been stricken from the program. Much time will be spent in the Great
+        Bear, and, indeed, in every constellation of importance. So, also, with
+        the Sun and Moon and the Milky Way, otherwise the Gulf Stream of the
+        Skies. Clothing suitable for wear in the sun should be provided. Our
+        program has been so arranged that we shall seldom go more than
+        100,000,000 of miles at a time without stopping at some star. This will
+        necessarily make the stoppages frequent and preserve the interest of the
+        tourist. Baggage checked through to any point on the route. Parties
+        desiring to make only a part of the proposed tour, and thus save
+        expense, may stop over at any star they choose and wait for the return
+        voyage.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        After visiting all the most celebrated stars and constellations in our
+        system and personally inspecting the remotest sparks that even the most
+        powerful telescope can now detect in the firmament, we shall proceed
+        with good heart upon
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        A STUPENDOUS VOYAGE
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        of discovery among the countless whirling worlds that make turmoil in
+        the mighty wastes of space that stretch their solemn solitudes, their
+        unimaginable vastness billions upon billions of miles away beyond the
+        farthest verge of telescopic vision, till by comparison the little
+        sparkling vault we used to gaze at on Earth shall seem like a remembered
+        phosphorescent flash of spangles which some tropical voyager's prow
+        stirred into life for a single instant, and which ten thousand miles of
+        phosphorescent seas and tedious lapse of time had since diminished to an
+        incident utterly trivial in his recollection. Children occupying seats
+        at the first table will be charged full fare.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        FIRST-CLASS FARE
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        from the Earth to Uranus, including visits to the Sun and Moon and all
+        the principal planets on the route, will be charged at the low rate of
+        $2 for every 50,000,000 miles of actual travel. A great reduction will
+        be made where parties wish to make the round trip. This comet is new and
+        in thorough repair and is now on her first voyage. She is confessedly
+        the fastest on the line. She makes 20,000,000 miles a day, with her
+        present facilities; but, with a picked American crew and good weather,
+        we are confident we can get 40,000,000 out of her. Still, we shall never
+        push her to a dangerous speed, and we shall rigidly prohibit racing with
+        other comets. Passengers desiring to diverge at any point or return will
+        be transferred to other comets. We make close connections at all
+        principal points with all reliable lines. Safety can be depended upon.
+        It is not to be denied that the heavens are infested with
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        OLD RAMSHACKLE COMETS
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        that have not been inspected or overhauled in 10,000 years, and which
+        ought long ago to have been destroyed or turned into hail-barges, but
+        with these we have no connection whatever. Steerage passengers not
+        allowed abaft the main hatch.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Complimentary round-trip tickets have been tendered to General Butler,
+        Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Richardson, and other eminent gentlemen, whose public
+        services have entitled them to the rest and relaxation of a voyage of
+        this kind. Parties desiring to make the round trip will have extra
+        accommodation. The entire voyage will be completed, and the passengers
+        landed in New York again, on the 14th of December, 1991. This is, at
+        least, forty years quicker than any other comet can do it in. Nearly all
+        the back-pay members contemplate making the round trip with us in case
+        their constituents will allow them a holiday. Every harmless amusement
+        will be allowed on board, but no pools permitted on the run of the comet&mdash;no
+        gambling of any kind. All fixed stars will be respected by us, but such
+        stars as seem to need fixing we shall fix. If it makes trouble, we shall
+        be sorry, but firm.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mr. Coggia having leased his comet to us, she will no longer be called
+        by his name, but by my partner's. N. B.&mdash;Passengers by paying
+        double fare will be entitled to a share in all the new stars, suns,
+        moons, comets, meteors, and magazines of thunder and lightning we may
+        discover. Patent-medicine people will take notice that
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        WE CARRY BULLETIN-BOARDS
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        and a paint-brush along for use in the constellations, and are open to
+        terms. Cremationists are reminded that we are going straight to&mdash;some
+        hot places&mdash;and are open to terms. To other parties our enterprise
+        is a pleasure excursion, but individually we mean business. We shall fly
+        our comet for all it is worth.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <h3>
+        FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS,
+      </h3>
+      <p>
+        or for freight or passage, apply on board, or to my partner, but not to
+        me, since I do not take charge of the comet until she is under way. It
+        is necessary, at a time like this, that my mind should not be burdened
+        with small business details.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MARK
+        TWAIN.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="governor" id="governor"></a>RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [Written about 1870.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p311.jpg (141K)" src="images/p311.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few months ago I was nominated for Governor of the great state of New
+      York, to run against Mr. John T. Smith and Mr. Blank J. Blank on an
+      independent ticket. I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage over
+      these gentlemen, and that was&mdash;good character. It was easy to see by
+      the newspapers that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good
+      name, that time had gone by. It was plain that in these latter years they
+      had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes. But at the very
+      moment that I was exalting my advantage and joying in it in secret, there
+      was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort "riling" the deeps of my happiness,
+      and that was&mdash;the having to hear my name bandied about in familiar
+      connection with those of such people. I grew more and more disturbed.
+      Finally I wrote my grandmother about it. Her answer came quick and sharp.
+      She said:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed of&mdash;not
+        one. Look at the newspapers&mdash;look at them and comprehend what sort
+        of characters Messrs. Smith and Blank are, and then see if you are
+        willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a public canvass with
+        them.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      It was my very thought! I did not sleep a single moment that night. But,
+      after all, I could not recede.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was fully committed, and must go on with the fight. As I was looking
+      listlessly over the papers at breakfast I came across this paragraph, and
+      I may truly say I never was so confounded before.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        PERJURY.&mdash;Perhaps, now that Mr. Mark Twain is before the people as
+        a candidate for Governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to
+        be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses in Wakawak, Cochin
+        China, in 1863, the intent of which perjury being to rob a poor native
+        widow and her helpless family of a meager plantain-patch, their only
+        stay and support in their bereavement and desolation. Mr. Twain owes it
+        to himself, as well as to the great people whose suffrages he asks, to
+        clear this matter up. Will he do it?
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      I thought I should burst with amazement! Such a cruel, heartless charge! I
+      never had seen Cochin China! I never had heard of Wakawak! I didn't know a
+      plantain-patch from a kangaroo! I did not know what to do. I was crazed
+      and helpless. I let the day slip away without doing anything at all. The
+      next morning the same paper had this&mdash;nothing more:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        SIGNIFICANT.&mdash;Mr. Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively
+        silent about the Cochin China perjury.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      [Mem.&mdash;During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to
+      me in any other way than as "the infamous perjurer Twain."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next came the Gazette, with this:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        WANTED TO KNOW.&mdash;Will the new candidate for Governor deign to
+        explain to certain of his fellow-citizens (who are suffering to vote for
+        him!) the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Montana losing small
+        valuables from time to time, until at last, these things having been
+        invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his "trunk" (newspaper he
+        rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to give him a friendly
+        admonition for his own good, and so tarred and feathered him, and rode
+        him on a rail; and then advised him to leave a permanent vacuum in the
+        place he usually occupied in the camp. Will he do this?
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that? For I never was
+      in Montana in my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as, "Twain, the Montana
+      Thief."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I got to picking up papers apprehensively&mdash;much as one would lift a
+      desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it.
+      One day this met my eye:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        THE LIE NAILED.&mdash;By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan,
+        Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr. Snub Rafferty and Mr. Catty Mulligan,
+        of Water Street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's vile statement
+        that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-bearer, Blank J.
+        Blank, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal and gratuitous LIE,
+        without a shadow of foundation in fact. It is disheartening to virtuous
+        men to see such shameful means resorted to to achieve political success
+        as the attacking of the dead in their graves, and defiling their honored
+        names with slander. When we think of the anguish this miserable
+        falsehood must cause the innocent relatives and friends of the deceased,
+        we are almost driven to incite an outraged and insulted public to
+        summary and unlawful vengeance upon the traducer. But no! let us leave
+        him to the agony of a lacerated conscience (though if passion should get
+        the better of the public, and in its blind fury they should do the
+        traducer bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict
+        and no court punish the perpetrators of the deed).
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      The ingenious closing sentence had the effect of moving me out of bed with
+      despatch that night, and out at the back door also, while the "outraged
+      and insulted public" surged in the front way, breaking furniture and
+      windows in their righteous indignation as they came, and taking off such
+      property as they could carry when they went. And yet I can lay my hand
+      upon the Book and say that I never slandered Mr. Blank's grandfather.
+      More: I had never even heard of him or mentioned him up to that day and
+      date.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [I will state, in passing, that the journal above quoted from always
+      referred to me afterward as "Twain, the Body-Snatcher."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next newspaper article that attracted my attention was the following:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        A SWEET CANDIDATE.&mdash;Mr. Mark Twain, who was to make such a
+        blighting speech at the mass-meeting of the Independents last night,
+        didn't come to time! A telegram from his physician stated that he had
+        been knocked down by a runaway team, and his leg broken in two places&mdash;sufferer
+        lying in great agony, and so forth, and so forth, and a lot more bosh of
+        the same sort. And the Independents tried hard to swallow the wretched
+        subterfuge, and pretend that they did not know what was the real reason
+        of the absence of the abandoned creature whom they denominate their
+        standard-bearer. A certain man was seen to reel into Mr. Twain's hotel
+        last night in a state of beastly intoxication. It is the imperative duty
+        of the Independents to prove that this besotted brute was not Mark Twain
+        himself. We have them at last! This is a case that admits of no
+        shirking. The voice of the people demands in thunder tones, "WHO WAS
+        THAT MAN?"
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      It was incredible, absolutely incredible, for a moment, that it was really
+      my name that was coupled with this disgraceful suspicion. Three long years
+      had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine or liquor of
+      any kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [It shows what effect the times were having on me when I say that I saw
+      myself, confidently dubbed "Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain" in the next issue
+      of that journal without a pang&mdash;notwithstanding I knew that with
+      monotonous fidelity the paper would go on calling me so to the very end.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time anonymous letters were getting to be an important part of my
+      mail matter. This form was common:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        How about that old woman you kiked of your premises which was beging.<br />
+        POL. PRY.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      And this:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        There is things which you have done which is unbeknowens to anybody but
+        me. You better trot out a few dots, to yours truly, or you'll hear
+        through the papers from<br /> HANDY ANDY.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      This is about the idea. I could continue them till the reader was
+      surfeited, if desirable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly the principal Republican journal "convicted" me of wholesale
+      bribery, and the leading Democratic paper "nailed" an aggravated case of
+      blackmailing to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [In this way I acquired two additional names: "Twain the Filthy
+      Corruptionist" and "Twain the Loathsome Embracer."]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an "answer" to all
+      the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of
+      my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any
+      longer. As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following
+      appeared in one of the papers the very next day:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        BEHOLD THE MAN!&mdash;The independent candidate still maintains silence.
+        Because he dare not speak. Every accusation against him has been amply
+        proved, and they have been indorsed and reindorsed by his own eloquent
+        silence, till at this day he stands forever convicted. Look upon your
+        candidate, Independents! Look upon the Infamous Perjurer! the Montana
+        Thief! the Body-Snatcher! Contemplate your incarnate Delirium Tremens!
+        your Filthy Corruptionist! your Loathsome Embracer! Gaze upon him&mdash;ponder
+        him well&mdash;and then say if you can give your honest votes to a
+        creature who has earned this dismal array of titles by his hideous
+        crimes, and dares not open his mouth in denial of any one of them!
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so, in deep
+      humiliation, I set about preparing to "answer" a mass of baseless charges
+      and mean and wicked falsehoods. But I never finished the task, for the
+      very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity,
+      and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all its
+      inmates, because it obstructed the view from my house. This threw me into
+      a sort of panic. Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get his
+      property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened. This
+      drove me to the verge of distraction. On top of this I was accused of
+      employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food for
+      the foundling hospital when I warden. I was wavering&mdash;wavering. And
+      at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution that
+      party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children, of all
+      shades of color and degrees of raggedness, were taught to rush onto the
+      platform at a public meeting, and clasp me around the legs and call me PA!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p315.jpg (58K)" src="images/p315.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave it up. I hauled down my colors and surrendered. I was not equal to
+      the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the state of New York, and
+      so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of spirit
+      signed it, "Truly yours, once a decent man, but now
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"MARK TWAIN, LLP., M.T., B.S., D.T.,
+      F.C., and L.E."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="mysterious" id="mysterious"></a>A MYSTERIOUS VISIT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p316.jpg (90K)" src="images/p316.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first notice that was taken of me when I "settled down" recently was
+      by a gentleman who said he was an assessor, and connected with the U. S.
+      Internal Revenue Department. I said I had never heard of his branch of
+      business before, but I was very glad to see him all the same. Would he sit
+      down? He sat down. I did not know anything particular to say, and yet I
+      felt that people who have arrived at the dignity of keeping house must be
+      conversational, must be easy and sociable in company. So, in default of
+      anything else to say, I asked him if he was opening his shop in our
+      neighborhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said he was. [I did not wish to appear ignorant, but I had hoped he
+      would mention what he had for sale.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ventured to ask him "How was trade?" And he said "So-so."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I then said we would drop in, and if we liked his house as well as any
+      other, we would give him our custom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said he thought we would like his establishment well enough to confine
+      ourselves to it&mdash;said he never saw anybody who would go off and hunt
+      up another man in his line after trading with him once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That sounded pretty complacent, but barring that natural expression of
+      villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know how it came about exactly, but gradually we appeared to melt
+      down and run together, conversationally speaking, and then everything went
+      along as comfortably as clockwork.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked, and talked, and talked&mdash;at least I did; and we laughed,
+      and laughed, and laughed&mdash;at least he did. But all the time I had my
+      presence of mind about me&mdash;I had my native shrewdness turned on "full
+      head," as the engineers say. I was determined to find out all about his
+      business in spite of his obscure answers&mdash;and I was determined I
+      would have it out of him without his suspecting what I was at. I meant to
+      trap him with a deep, deep ruse. I would tell him all about my own
+      business, and he would naturally so warm to me during this seductive burst
+      of confidence that he would forget himself, and tell me all about his
+      affairs before he suspected what I was about. I thought to myself, My son,
+      you little know what an old fox you are dealing with. I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now you never would guess what I made lecturing this winter and last
+      spring?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "No&mdash;don't believe I could, to save me. Let me see&mdash;let me see.
+      About two thousand dollars, maybe? But no; no, sir, I know you couldn't
+      have made that much. Say seventeen hundred, maybe?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ha! ha! I knew you couldn't. My lecturing receipts for last spring and
+      this winter were fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars. What
+      do you think of that?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why, it is amazing-perfectly amazing. I will make a note of it. And you
+      say even this wasn't all?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "All! Why bless you, there was my income from the Daily Warwhoop for four
+      months&mdash;about&mdash;about&mdash;well, what should you say to about
+      eight thousand dollars, for instance?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Say! Why, I should say I should like to see myself rolling in just such
+      another ocean of affluence. Eight thousand! I'll make a note of it. Why
+      man!&mdash;and on top of all this am I to understand that you had still
+      more income?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ha! ha! ha! Why, you're only in the suburbs of it, so to speak. There's
+      my book, The Innocents Abroad&mdash;price $3.50 to $5, according to the
+      binding. Listen to me. Look me in the eye. During the last four months and
+      a half, saying nothing of sales before that, but just simply during the
+      four months and a half, we've sold ninety-five thousand copies of that
+      book. Ninety-five thousand! Think of it. Average four dollars a copy, say.
+      It's nearly four hundred thousand dollars, my son. I get half."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The suffering Moses! I'll set that down. Fourteen-seven&mdash;fifty-eight&mdash;two
+      hundred. Total, say&mdash;well, upon my word, the grand total is about two
+      hundred and thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars! Is that possible?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Possible! If there's any mistake it's the other way. Two hundred and
+      fourteen thousand, cash, is my income for this year if I know how to
+      cipher."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the gentleman got up to go. It came over me most uncomfortably that
+      maybe I had made my revelations for nothing, besides being flattered into
+      stretching them considerably by the stranger's astonished exclamations.
+      But no; at the last moment the gentleman handed me a large envelope, and
+      said it contained his advertisement; and that I would find out all about
+      his business in it; and that he would be happy to have my custom&mdash;would,
+      in fact, be proud to have the custom of a man of such prodigious income;
+      and that he used to think there were several wealthy men in the city, but
+      when they came to trade with him he discovered that they barely had enough
+      to live on; and that, in truth, it had been such a weary, weary age since
+      he had seen a rich man face to face, and talked to him, and touched him
+      with his hands, that he could hardly refrain from embracing me&mdash;in
+      fact, would esteem it a great favor if I would let him embrace me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This so pleased me that I did not try to resist, but allowed this
+      simple-hearted stranger to throw his arms about me and weep a few
+      tranquilizing tears down the back of my neck. Then he went his way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as he was gone I opened his advertisement. I studied it
+      attentively for four minutes. I then called up the cook, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Hold me while I faint! Let Marie turn the griddle-cakes."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By and by, when I came to, I sent down to the rum-mill on the corner and
+      hired an artist by the week to sit up nights and curse that stranger, and
+      give me a lift occasionally in the daytime when I came to a hard place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, what a miscreant he was! His "advertisement" was nothing in the world
+      but a wicked tax-return&mdash;a string of impertinent questions about my
+      private affairs, occupying the best part of four fools-cap pages of fine
+      print&mdash;questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous
+      ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn't understand what the
+      most of them were driving at&mdash;questions, too, that were calculated to
+      make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from swearing
+      to a falsehood. I looked for a loophole, but there did not appear to be
+      any. Inquiry No. 1 covered my case as generously and as amply as an
+      umbrella could cover an ant-hill:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        What were your profits, during the past year, from any trade, business,
+        or vocation, wherever carried on?
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      And that inquiry was backed up by thirteen others of an equally searching
+      nature, the most modest of which required information as to whether I had
+      committed any burglary or highway robbery, or by any arson or other secret
+      source of emolument had acquired property which was not enumerated in my
+      statement of income as set opposite to inquiry No. 1.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was plain that that stranger had enabled me to make a goose of myself.
+      It was very, very plain; and so I went out and hired another artist. By
+      working on my vanity, the stranger had seduced me into declaring an income
+      of two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars. By law, one thousand dollars
+      of this was exempt from income tax&mdash;the only relief I could see, and
+      it was only a drop in the ocean. At the legal five per cent., I must pay
+      to the government the sum of ten thousand six hundred and fifty dollars,
+      income tax!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [I may remark, in this place, that I did not do it.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am acquainted with a very opulent man, whose house is a palace, whose
+      table is regal, whose outlays are enormous, yet a man who has no income,
+      as I have often noticed by the revenue returns; and to him I went for
+      advice in my distress. He took my dreadful exhibition of receipts, he put
+      on his glasses, he took his pen, and presto!&mdash;I was a pauper! It was
+      the neatest thing that ever was. He did it simply by deftly manipulating
+      the bill of "DEDUCTIONS." He set down my "State, national, and municipal
+      taxes" at so much; my "losses by shipwreck; fire, etc.," at so much; my
+      "losses on sales of real estate"&mdash;on "live stock sold"&mdash;on
+      "payments for rent of homestead"&mdash;on "repairs, improvements,
+      interest"&mdash;on "previously taxed salary as an officer of the United
+      States army, navy, revenue service," and other things. He got astonishing
+      "deductions" out of each and every one of these matters&mdash;each and
+      every one of them. And when he was done he handed me the paper, and I saw
+      at a glance that during the year my income, in the way of profits, had
+      been one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars and forty cents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now," said he, "the thousand dollars is exempt by law. What you want to
+      do is to go and swear this document in and pay tax on the two hundred and
+      fifty dollars."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [While he was making this speech his little boy Willie lifted a two-dollar
+      greenback out of his vest pocket and vanished with it, and I would wager
+      anything that if my stranger were to call on that little boy to-morrow he
+      would make a false return of his income.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Do you," said I, "do you always work up the 'deductions' after this
+      fashion in your own case, sir?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, I should say so! If it weren't for those eleven saving clauses
+      under the head of 'Deductions' I should be beggared every year to support
+      this hateful and wicked, this extortionate and tyrannical government."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This gentleman stands away up among the very best of the solid men of the
+      city&mdash;the men of moral weight, of commercial integrity, of
+      unimpeachable social spotlessness&mdash;and so I bowed to his example. I
+      went down to the revenue office, and under the accusing eyes of my old
+      visitor I stood up and swore to lie after lie, fraud after fraud, villainy
+      after villainy, till my soul was coated inches and inches thick with
+      perjury, and my self-respect gone for ever and ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what of it? It is nothing more than thousands of the richest and
+      proudest, and most respected, honored, and courted men in America do every
+      year. And so I don't care. I am not ashamed. I shall simply, for the
+      present, talk little and eschew fire-proof gloves, lest I fall into
+      certain dreadful habits irrevocably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sketches New and Old, Complete
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, COMPLETE ***
+
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+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.net/3/1/8/3189/
+
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+
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+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.12.12.00*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+Sketches New and Old
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+PREFACE
+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
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never
+been in print before (such as "Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and
+Girls," the "Jumping Frog restored to the English tongue after martyrdom
+in the French," the "Membranous Croup" sketch, and many others which I
+need not specify): not doing this in order to make an advertisement of
+it, but because these things seemed instructive.
+
+HARTFORD, 1875.
+                                             MARK TWAIN.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+
+
+
+
+MY WATCH--[Written about 1870.]
+
+AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE
+
+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
+canebrake!  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 facet 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 bargains 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 beep 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
+humorists 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 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 --(French version is deleted
+from this edition)--, 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
+on 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 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 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 Smile) 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'1 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, partiular look,
+and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate,  'Well,' he says,
+'I don't see no pints 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 the 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 right0-that's all right if you'll hold
+my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog.'  Any 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 Teller 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 pints 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
+     
+"--Il y avait, une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim Smiley:
+c'etait dans l'hiver de 49, peut-etre bien au printemps de 50, je ne me
+reappelle pas exactement.  Ce qui me fait croire que c'etait l'un ou
+l'autre, c'est que je me souviens que le grand bief n'etait pas acheve
+lorsqu'il arriva au camp pour la premiere fois, mais de toutes facons il
+etait l'homme le plus friand de paris qui se put voir, pariant sur tout
+ce qui se presentaat, quand il pouvait trouver un adversaire, et, quand
+n'en trouvait pas il passait du cote oppose.  Tout ce qui convenaiat
+l'autre lui convenait; pourvu qu'il eut un pari, Smiley etait satisfait.
+Et il avait une chance! une chance inouie:  presque toujours il gagnait.
+It faut dire qu'il etait toujours pret a'exposer, qu'on ne pouvait
+mentionner la moindre chose sans que ce gaillard offrit de parier la-
+dessus n'importe quoi et de prendre le cote que l'on voudrait, comme je
+vous le disais tout a l'heure.  S'il y avait des courses, vous le
+trouviez riche ou ruine a la fin; s'il y avait un combat de chiens, il
+apportait son enjeu; il l'apportait pour un combat de chats, pour un
+combat de coqs;--parbleu! si vous aviez vu deux oiseaux sur une haie il
+vous aurait offert de parier lequel s'envolerait le premier, et s'il y
+aviat 'meeting' au camp, il venait parier regulierement pour le cure
+Walker, qu'il jugeait etre le meilleur predicateur des environs, et qui
+l'etait en effet, et un brave homme.  Il aurai rencontre une punaise de
+bois en chemin, qu'il aurait parie sur le temps qu'il lui faudrait pour
+aller ou 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 cure Walker fut tres malade
+pendant longtemps, il semblait qu'on ne la sauverait pas; mai un matin le
+cure arrive, et Smiley lui demande comment ella va et il dit qu'elle est
+bien mieux, grace a l'infinie misericorde tellement mieux qu'avec la 
+benediction de la Providence elle s'en tirerait, et voila que, sans y
+penser, Smiley repond:--Eh bien! ye gage deux et demi qu'elle mourra tout
+de meme.
+
+"Ce Smiley avait une jument que les gars appelaient le bidet du quart
+d'heure, mais seulement pour plaisanter, vous comprenez, parse que, bien
+entendu, elle etait plus vite que ca!  Et il avait coutume de gagner de
+l'argent avec cette bete, quoi-qu'elle fut poussive, cornarde, toujours
+prise d'asthme, de colique ou de consomption, ou de quelque chose
+d'approchant. On lui donnait 2 ou 300 'yards' au depart, puffs on la
+depassait sans peine; mais jamais a la fin elle ne manquait de
+s'echauffer, de s'exasperer et elle arrivait, s'ecartant, se defendant,
+ses jambes greles en l'ai devant les obstacles, quelquefois les evitant
+et faisant avec cela plus de poussiare qu'aucun cheval, plus de bruit
+surtout avec ses eternumens et reniflemens.---crac! elle arrivaat donc
+toujour premiere d'une tete, aussi juste qu'on peut le mesurer.  Et il
+avait un petit bouledogue qui, a le voir, ne valait pas un sou; on aurait
+cru que parier contre lui c'etait voler, tant il etait ordinaire; mais
+aussitot les enjeux faits, il devenait un autre chien.  Sa machoire
+inferieure commencait a ressortir comme un gaillard d'avant, ses dents se
+decouvcraient brillantes commes des fournaises, et un chien pouvait le
+taquiner, l'exciter, le mordre, le jeter deux ou trois fois par-dessus
+son epaule, Andre Jackson, c'etait le nom du chien, Andre Jackson prenait
+cela tranquillement, comme s'il ne se fut jamais attendu a autre chose,
+et quand les paris etaient doubles et redoubles contre lui, il vous
+saisissait l'autre chien juste a l'articulation de la jambe de derriere,
+et il ne la lachait plus, non pas qu'il la machat, vous concevez, mais il
+s'y serait tenu pendu jusqu'a ce qu'on jetat l'eponge en l'air, fallut-il
+attendre un an.  Smiley gagnait toujours avec cette bete-la;
+malheureusement ils ont fini par dresser un chien qui n'avait pas de
+pattes de derriere, parce qu'on les avait sciees, et quand les choses
+furent au point qu'il voulait, et qu'il en vint a se jeter sur son
+morceau favori, le pauvre chien comprit en un instant qu'on s'etait moque
+de lui, et que l'autre le tenait.  Vous n'avez jamais vu personne avoir
+l'air plus penaud et plus decourage; il ne fit aucun effort pour gagner
+le combat et fut rudement secoue, de sorte que, regardant Smiley comme
+pour lui dire:--Mon coeur est brise, c'est to faute; pourquoi m'avoir
+livre a un chien qui n'a pas de pattes de derriere, puisque c'est par la
+que je les bats?--il s'en alla en clopinant, et se coucha pour mourir.
+Ah! c'etait un bon chien, cet Andre Jackson, et il se serait fait un nom,
+s'il avait vecu, car il y avait de l'etoffe en lui, il avait du genie,
+je la sais, bien que de grandes occasions lui aient manque; mais il est
+impossible de supposer qu'un chien capable de se battre comme lui,
+certaines circonstances etant donnees, ait manque de talent.  Je me sens
+triste toutes les fois que je pense a son dernier combat et au denoument
+qu'il a eu.  Eh bien! ce Smiley nourrissait des terriers a rats, et des
+coqs combat, et des chats, et toute sorte de choses, au point qu'il etait
+toujours en mesure de vous tenir tete, 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 pretendait faire son Education; vous me croirez si
+vous voulez, mais pendant trois mois il n'a rien fait que lui apprendre a
+sauter dans une cour retire de sa maison. Et je vous reponds qu'il avait
+reussi.  Il lui donnait un petit coup par derriere, et l'instant d'apres
+vous voyiez la grenouille tourner en l'air comme un beignet au-dessus de
+la poele, faire une culbute, quelquefois deux, lorsqu'elle etait bien
+partie, et retomber sur ses pattes comme un chat.  Il l'avait dressee
+dans l'art de gober des mouches, er l'y exercait continuellement, si bien
+qu'une mouche, du plus loin qu'elle apparaissait, etait une mouche
+perdue. Smiley avait coutume de dire que tout ce qui manquait a une
+grenouille, c'etait l'education, qu'avec l'education elle pouvait faire
+presque tout, et je le crois.  Tenez, je l'ai vu poser Daniel Webster la
+sur se plancher,--Daniel Webster etait 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 saute de
+nouveau par terre, ou il restait vraiment a se gratter la tete avec sa
+patte de derriere, comme s'il n'avait pas eu la moindre idee de sa
+superiorite.  Jamais vous n'avez grenouille vu de aussi modeste, aussi
+naturelle, douee comme elle l'etait!  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 espece que vous puissiez connaitre. Sauter
+a plat, c'etait son fort! Quand il s'agissait de cela, Smiley en tassait
+les enjeux sur elle tant qu'il lui, restait un rouge liard. Il faut le
+reconnaitre, Smiley etait monstrueusement fier de sa grenouille, et il en
+avait le droit, car des gens qui avaient voyage, qui avaient tout vu,
+disaient qu'on lui ferait injure de la comparer a une autre; de facon que
+Smiley gardait Daniel dans une petite boite a claire-voie qu'il emportait
+parfois a la Ville pour quelque pari.
+
+"Un jour, un individu etranger au camp l'arrete aver sa boite et lui
+dit:--Qu'est-ce que vous avez donc serre la dedans?
+
+"Smiley dit d'un air indifferent:--Cela pourrait etre 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 cote et de
+l'autre puis il dit.--Tiens! en effet!  A quoi estelle bonne?
+
+"--Mon Dieu! repond Smiley, toujours d'un air degage, elle est bonne pour
+une chose a mon avis, elle peut battre en sautant toute grenouille du
+comte de Calaveras.
+
+"L'individu reprend la boite, l'examine de nouveau longuement, et la rend
+a Smiley en disant d'un air delibere:--Eh bien! je ne vois pas que cette
+grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune grenouille.
+
+"--Possible qua vous ne le voyiez pat, dit Smiley, possible que vous vous
+entendiez en grenouilles, possible que vous ne vous y entendez point,
+possible qua vous avez de l'experience, et possible que vous ne soyez
+qu'un amateur.  De toute maniere, je parie quarante dollars qu'elle
+battra en sautant n'importe quelle grenouille du comte de Calaveras.
+
+"L'individu reflechit one seconde et dit comma attriste:-- Je ne suis
+qu'un etranger ici, je n'ai pas de grenouille; mais, si j'en
+avais une, je tiendrais le pari.
+
+"--Fort bien! repond Smiley.  Rien de plus facile. Si vous voulez tenir
+ma boite one minute, j'irai vous chercher une grenouille.--Voile donc
+l'individu qui garde la boite, qui met ses quarante dollars sur ceux de
+Smiley et qui attend.  Il attend assez longtemps, reflechissant tout
+seul, et figurez-vous qu'il prend Daniel, lui ouvre la bouche de force at
+avec une cuiller a the l'emplit de menu plomb de chasse, mail l'emplit
+jusqu'au menton, puis il le pose par terre.  Smiley pendant ce temps
+etait a barboter dans une mare.  Finalement il attrape une grenouille,
+l'apporte cet individu et dit:--Maintenant, si vous etes pret, mettez-la
+tout contra Daniel, avec leurs pattes de devant sur la meme ligne, et je
+donnerai le signal; puis il ajoute:-- Un, deux, trois, sautez!
+
+"Lui et l'individu touchent leurs grenouilles par derriere, et la
+grenouille neuve se met h sautiller, mais Daniel se souleve lourdement,
+hausse les epaules ainsi, comma un Francais; a quoi bon? il ne pouvait
+bouger, il etait plante solide comma une enclume, il n'avancait pas plus
+que si on l'eut mis a l'ancre. Smiley fut surpris et degoute, 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'epaule, comma ca, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air
+delibere:--Eh bien! je ne vois pas qua cette grenouille ait rien de muiex
+qu'une autre.
+
+"Smiley se gratta longtemps la tete, les yeux fixes Sur Daniel; jusqu'a
+ce qu'enfin il dit:--je me demande comment diable il se fait qua cette
+bite ait refuse, . . . Est-ce qu'elle aurait quelque chose? . . . On
+croirait qu'elle est enflee.
+
+"Il empoigne Daniel par la peau du coo, le souleve et dit:--Le loup me
+croque, s'il ne pese pas cinq livres.
+
+"Il le retourne, et le malheureux crache deux poignees de plomb.  Quand
+Smiley reconnut ce qui en etait, il fut comme fou.  Vous le voyez d'ici
+poser sa grenouille par terra et courir apres 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 a l'heure).  If it there was of races, you him find
+rich or ruined at the end; if it, here 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 cure Walker, which he judged to be the best predicator of the
+neighborhood (predicateur des environs) and which he was in effect, and a
+brave man.  He would encounter a bug of wood in the road, whom he will
+bet upon the time which he shall take to go where she would go--and if
+you him have take at the word, he will follow the bug as far as Mexique,
+without 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, grace a l'infinie misericorde) 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 echauffer,
+of herself exasperate, and she arrives herself ecartant, se defendant,
+her legs greles in the air before the obstacles, sometimes them elevating
+and making with this more of dust than any horse, more of noise above
+with his eternumens and reniflemens--crac! she arrives then always first
+by one head, as just as one can it measure.  And he had a small 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, Andre Jackson--this was the name of the dog--Andre Jackson
+takes that tranquilly, as if he not himself was never expecting other
+thing, and when the bets were doubled and redoubled against him, he you
+seize the other dog just at the articulation of the leg of behind, and he
+not it leave more, not that he it 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-la;
+unhappily they have finished by elevating a dog who no had not of feet of
+behind, because one them had sawed; and when things were at the point
+that he would, and that he came to himself throw upon his morsel
+favorite, the poor dog comprehended in an instant that he himself was
+deceived in him, and that the other dog him had.  You no have never 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 a rats, and some cocks of
+combat, and some pats, 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 1'emporta chez lui) saying that he pretended to
+make his education.  You me believe if you will, but during three months
+he not has nothing done but to him apprehend to jump (apprendre a sauter)
+in a court retired of her mansion (de sa maison).  And I you respond that
+he have 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 fifes!"--in a flash of the eye Daniel 30
+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 (A mon avis),she can better in jumping (elle pent
+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 maniere) I bet forty dollars that
+she better 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 d pouce par-dessus l'epaule, comme ga, au
+pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air delibere):
+
+"Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothin 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
+pints 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 Dallyhack 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 sc 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, down-
+stairs.  He advertises--we take it out in trade."
+
+He was gone.  I shuddered.  At the end of the next three hours I had been
+through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were
+gone from me.  Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window.
+Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took
+the job off my hands.  In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill
+of fare, I had lost my scalp.  Another stranger, by the name of Thompson,
+left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags.  And at last, at bay in
+the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs,
+politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their
+weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of
+steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief
+arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends.  Then
+ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one
+either, could describe.  People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up,
+thrown out of the window.  There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy,
+with a confused and frantic war-dance 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 stovepipe 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 boy deserved to be exalted, and then tell him 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--[Witten 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
+gold little boys they put in the Sunday-school book; 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 so 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 lithe 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-boo 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 hackful of small
+reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's
+unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages
+after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood-relations, the
+other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust.
+
+There is no actual harm in making Niagara a 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.  Nova 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 takon' 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!"  "Bang 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 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 by 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 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 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, stirnn'
+     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 a twidle his thumbs because there didn't
+     happen to be nothin' do 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" (calkatin' 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
+butter milk 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.
+
+
+     "ARITIIMETICUS." 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 cove-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 earned
+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
+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 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, they 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,
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 a 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 be come 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
+
+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 dears!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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's here,
+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 resume can be amply proved by the official
+records of the General Government.
+
+John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey,
+deceased, contracted with the General Government, on or about the 10th
+day of October, 1861, to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of
+thirty barrels of beef.
+
+Very well.
+
+He started after Sherman with the beef, but when he got to Washington
+Sherman had gone to 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 W.
+Bartholomew W.  made out the following bill, and then died:
+
+     THE UNITED STATES
+
+               In account with JOHN WILSON MACKENZIE, of New Jersey,
+               deceased, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .          Dr.
+
+     To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100, $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 l0th 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 hi presence--kindly, but
+firmly.  The next day 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 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 this 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, $110,004.89 for the indigent Fishers.  So now we have: First,
+$8,873 damages; second, interest on it from 1832 to 1848, $8997.94;
+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 silent 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 in 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 then 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 we: 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 th emaciated Fishers.  This clerk (I can
+produce him whenever he is wanted) discovered what was apparently a
+glaring and recent forgery in the paper; 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.
+                                                             DOL.C
+1813.--To 550 head of cattle, at 10 dollars, ............. 5,500.00
+       To 86 head of drove hogs, ......................... 1,204.00
+       To 350 head of stock hogs, ........................ 1,750.00
+       To 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT'S CREEK, .......... 6,000.00
+       To 8 barrels of whisky, ...........................   350.00
+       To 2 barrels of brandy, ...........................   280.00
+       To 1 barrel of rum, ...............................    70.00
+       To dry-goods and merchandise in store, ............ 1,100.00
+       To 35 acres of wheat, .............................   350.00
+       To 2,000 hides, ................................... 4,000.00
+       To furs and hats in store, ........................   600.00
+       To crockery ware in store, ........................   100.00
+       To smith's and carpenter's tools, .................   250.00
+       To houses burned and destroyed, ...................   600.00
+       To 4 dozen bottles of wine, .......................    48.00
+1814.--To 120 acres of corn on Alabama River, ............ 9,500.00
+       To crops of peas, fodder, etc. .................... 3,250.00
+
+                         Total, ..........................34,952.00
+
+       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 I86o, 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 along
+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 damp 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 earned 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
+stewed 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 thereby
+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 eKpedition, 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, 6 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 tooth-
+mark 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 soil
+--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 let 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
+creation 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 exceedings 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 Mat 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 I 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
+as 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.
+
+     "'Messes. 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 Jaw
+     bone 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 bash, 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
+
+
+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, huzzy!  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.  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 tie 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 strange 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' 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 save 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 self-same 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 Phenix'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 while 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 eclat, 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 mate, 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
+
+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-grand mother
+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 fiend 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 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.  It 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 lov an' kind to me, jist as kind as you is to yo' own
+wife.  An' we had chil'en--seven chil'en--an' 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 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 tetch 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, de 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 indisposition,
+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.]
+
+On 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, anal 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 is 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 wait 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 Caf‚.]
+
+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 bees 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 is 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 center has
+extended to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple band of
+brothers working sweetly hand in hand--the Colt's Arms Company making the
+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 may 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 abort 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 hard 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 eclat, 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 pint 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 along
+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 Jose; 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
+infect 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 Jerkins may
+get an idea therefrom:
+
+Mrs. W. M. was attired in an elegant 'pate 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 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 far 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 ruin 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 expansive for me!"
+
+I think the seditious disposition, restrained by the economical instinct,
+is finely put in that.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION
+
+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 alight (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 confreres 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 pious and correct wishes.  When I was seven years of
+age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total
+abstinence; and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my
+mother."
+
+I never saw anything so curious.  It is almost an exact epitome of my own
+moral career--after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother.  How
+well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco, good old
+soul!  She said, "You're at it again, are you, you whelp?  Now don't ever
+let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay I'll
+blacksnake you within an inch of your life!"  I have never touched it at
+that hour of the morning from that time to the present day.
+
+She asked me not to gamble.  She whispered and said, "Put up those wicked
+cards this minute!--two pair and a jack, you numskull, and the other
+fellow's got a flush!"
+
+I never have gambled from that day to this--never once--without a "cold
+deck" in my pocket.  I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games
+that are being played unless I deal myself.
+
+When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a
+resolution of total abstinence.  That I have adhered to it and enjoyed
+the beneficent effects of it through all time, I owe to my grandmother.
+I have never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HONORED AS A CURIOSITY
+
+If you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu, and experience
+that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by
+finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and
+address him as "Captain."  Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his
+countenance that you are on the wrong track, ask him where he preaches.
+It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler.
+I became personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six
+missionaries.  The captains and ministers form one-half of the
+population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile
+foreigners and their families; and the final fourth is made up of high
+officers of the Hawaiian Government.  And there are just about cats
+enough for three apiece all around.
+
+A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs one day, and said:
+
+"Good morning, your reverence.  Preach in the stone church yonder, no
+doubt!"
+
+"No, I don't.  I'm not a preacher."
+
+"Really, I beg your pardon, captain.  I trust you had a good season.  How
+much oil--"
+
+"Oil!  Why, what do you take me for?  I'm not a whaler."
+
+"Oh!  I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency.  Major-General in the
+household troops, no doubt?  Minister of the Interior, likely?  Secretary
+of War?  First Gentleman of the Bedchamber?  Commissioner of the Royal--"
+
+"Stuff, man!  I'm not connected in any way with the government."
+
+"Bless my life!  Then who the mischief are you? what the mischief are
+you? and how the mischief did you get here? and where in thunder did you
+come from?"
+
+"I'm only a private personage--an unassuming stranger--lately arrived
+from America."
+
+" No!  Not a missionary! not a whaler! not a member of his Majesty's
+government! not even a Secretary of the Navy!  Ah!  Heaven! it is too
+blissful to be true, alas! I do but dream.  And yet that noble, honest
+countenance--those oblique, ingenuous eyes--that massive head, incapable
+of--of anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif.  Excuse these
+tears.  For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this,
+and--"
+
+Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away.  I pitied
+this poor creature from the bottom of my heart.  I was deeply moved.
+I shed a few tears on him, and kissed him for his mother.  I then took
+what small change he had, and "shoved."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD --[Written about 1870.]
+
+I had never seen him before.  He brought letters of introduction from
+mutual friends in San Francisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with
+him.  It was almost religion, there in the silver-mines, to precede such
+a meal with whisky cocktails.  Artemus, with the true cosmopolitan
+instinct, always deferred to the customs of the country he was in, and so
+he ordered three of those abominations.  Hingston was present.  I said I
+would rather not drink a whisky cocktail.  I said it would go right to my
+head, and confuse me so that I would be in a helpless tangle in ten
+minutes.  I did not want to act like a lunatic before strangers.  But
+Artemus gently insisted, and I drank the treasonable mixture under
+protest, and felt all the time that I was doing a thing I might be sorry
+for.  In a minute or two I began to imagine that my ideas were clouded.
+I waited in great anxiety for the conversation to open, with a sort of
+vague hope that my understanding would prove clear, after all, and my
+misgivings groundless.
+
+Artemus dropped an unimportant remark or two, and then assumed a look of
+superhuman earnestness, and made the following astounding speech.  He
+said:
+
+"Now there is one thing I ought to ask you about before I forget it.  You
+have been here in Silver land--here in Nevada--two or three years, and,
+of course, your position on the daily press has made it necessary for you
+to go down in the mines and examine them carefully in detail, and
+therefore you know all about the silver-mining business.  Now what I want
+to get at is--is, well, the way the deposits of ore are made, you know.
+For instance.  Now, as I understand it, the vein which contains the
+silver is sandwiched in between casings of granite, and runs along the
+ground, and sticks up like a curb stone.  Well, take a vein forty feet
+thick, for example, or eighty, for that matter, or even a hundred--say
+you go down on it with a shaft, straight down, you know, or with what you
+call 'incline' maybe you go down five hundred feet, or maybe you don't go
+down but two hundred--anyway, you go down, and all the time this vein
+grows narrower, when the casings come nearer or approach each other, you
+may say--that is, when they do approach, which, of course, they do not
+always do, particularly in cases where the nature of the formation is
+such that they stand apart wider than they otherwise would, and which
+geology has failed to account for, although everything in that science
+goes to prove that, all things being equal, it would if it did not, or
+would not certainly if it did, and then, of course, they are.  Do not you
+think it is?"
+
+I said to myself:
+
+"Now I just knew how it would be--that whisky cocktail has done the
+business for me; I don't understand any more than a clam."
+
+And then I said aloud:
+
+"I--I--that is--if you don't mind, would you--would you say that over
+again?  I ought--"
+
+"Oh, certainly, certainly!  You see I am very unfamiliar with the
+subject, and perhaps I don't present my case clearly, but I--"
+
+"No, no-no, no-you state it plain enough, but that cocktail has muddled
+me a little.  But I will no, I do understand for that matter; but I would
+get the hang of it all the better if you went over it again-and I'll pay
+better attention this time.
+
+He said; "Why, what I was after was this."
+
+[Here he became even more fearfully impressive than ever, and emphasized
+each particular point by checking it off on his finger-ends.]
+
+"This vein, or lode, or ledge, or whatever you call it, runs along
+between two layers of granite, just the same as if it were a sandwich.
+Very well.  Now suppose you go down on that, say a thousand feet, or
+maybe twelve hundred (it don't really matter) before you drift, and then
+you start your drifts, some of them across the ledge, and others along
+the length of it, where the sulphurets--I believe they call them
+sulphurets, though why they should, considering that, so far as I can
+see, the main dependence of a miner does not so lie, as some suppose, but
+in which it cannot be successfully maintained, wherein the same should
+not continue, while part and parcel of the same ore not committed to
+either in the sense referred to, whereas, under different circumstances,
+the most inexperienced among us could not detect it if it were, or might
+overlook it if it did, or scorn the very idea of such a thing, even
+though it were palpably demonstrated as such.  Am I not right?"
+
+I said, sorrowfully: "I feel ashamed of myself, Mr.  Ward.  I know I
+ought to understand you perfectly well, but you see that treacherous
+whisky cocktail has got into my head, and now I cannot understand even
+the simplest proposition.  I told you how it would be."
+
+"Oh, don't mind it, don't mind it; the fault was my own, no doubt--though
+I did think it clear enough for--"
+
+"Don't say a word.  Clear!  Why, you stated it as clear as the sun to
+anybody but an abject idiot; but it's that confounded cocktail that has
+played the mischief."
+
+"No; now don't say that.  I'll begin it all over again, and--"
+
+"Don't now--for goodness' sake, don't do anything of the kind, because I
+tell you my head is in such a condition that I don't believe I could
+understand the most trifling question a man could ask me.
+
+"Now don't you be afraid.  I'll put it so plain this time that you can't
+help but get the hang of it.  We will begin at the very beginning."
+[Leaning far across the table, with determined impressiveness wrought
+upon his every feature, and fingers prepared to keep tally of each point
+enumerated; and I, leaning forward with painful interest, resolved to
+comprehend or perish.]  "You know the vein, the ledge, the thing that
+contains the metal, whereby it constitutes the medium between all other
+forces, whether of present or remote agencies, so brought to bear in
+favor of the former against the latter, or the latter against the former
+or all, or both, or compromising the relative differences existing within
+the radius whence culminate the several degrees of similarity to which--"
+
+I said: "Oh, hang my wooden head, it ain't any use!--it ain't any use to
+try--I can't understand anything.  The plainer you get it the more I
+can't get the hang of it."
+
+I heard a suspicious noise behind me, and turned in time to see Hingston
+dodging behind a newspaper, and quaking with a gentle ecstasy of
+laughter.  I looked at Ward again, and he had thrown off his dread
+solemnity and was laughing also.  Then I saw that I had been sold--that I
+had been made a victim of a swindle in the way of a string of plausibly
+worded sentences that didn't mean anything under the sun.  Artemus Ward
+was one of the best fellows in the world, and one of the most
+companionable.  It has been said that he was not fluent in conversation,
+but, with the above experience in my mind, I differ.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS --[Written abort 1867.]
+
+I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way West, after changing cars at
+Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about
+forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat
+down beside me.  We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an
+hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining.
+When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask
+questions about various public men, and about Congressional affairs; and
+I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly
+familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capital, even to
+the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and
+Representatives in the Chambers of the national Legislature.  Presently
+two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other:
+
+"Harris, if you'll do that for me, I'll never forget you, my boy."
+
+My new comrade's eye lighted pleasantly.  The words had touched upon a
+happy memory, I thought.  Then his face settled into thoughtfulness--
+almost into gloom.  He turned to me and said,
+
+"Let me tell you a story; let me give you a secret chapter of my life--
+a chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events
+transpired.  Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt
+me."
+
+I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure,
+speaking sometimes with animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always
+with feeling and earnestness.
+
+
+                         THE STRANGER'S NARRATIVE
+
+"On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening
+train bound for Chicago.  There were only twenty-four passengers, all
+told.  There were no ladies and no children.  We were in excellent
+spirits, and pleasant acquaintanceships were soon formed.  The journey
+bade fair to be a happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had
+even the vaguest presentiment of the horrors we were soon to undergo.
+
+"At 11 P.m.  it began to snow hard.  Shortly after leaving the small
+village of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that
+stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward
+the jubilee Settlements.  The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills, or
+even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving
+the falling snow before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy
+sea.  The snow was deepening fast; and we knew, by the diminished speed
+of the train, that the engine was plowing through it with steadily
+increasing difficulty.  Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes,
+in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves
+across the track.  Conversation began to flag.  Cheerfulness gave place
+to grave concern.  The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on
+the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every
+mind, and extended its depressing influence over every spirit.
+
+"At two o'clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by
+the ceasing of all motion about me.  The appalling truth flashed upon me
+instantly--we were captives in a snow-drift!  'All hands to the rescue!'
+Every man sprang to obey.  Out into the wild night, the pitchy darkness,
+the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the
+consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all.
+Shovels, hands, boards--anything, everything that could displace snow,
+was brought into instant requisition.  It was a weird picture, that small
+company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the blackest
+shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotive's reflector.
+
+"One short hour sufficed to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts.
+The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away.
+And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand charge the
+engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the
+driving-wheel!  With a free track before us we should still have been
+helpless.  We entered the car wearied with labor, and very sorrowful.
+We gathered about the stoves, and gravely canvassed our situation.  We
+had no provisions whatever--in this lay our chief distress.  We could not
+freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender.  This was our
+only comfort.  The discussion ended at last in accepting the
+disheartening decision of the conductor, viz., that it would be death for
+any man to attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that.
+We could not send for help, and even if we could it would not come.  We
+must submit, and await, as patiently as we might, succor or starvation!
+I think the stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words
+were uttered.
+
+"Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there
+about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the
+blast; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled
+themselves among the flickering shadows to think--to forget the present,
+if they could--to sleep, if they might.
+
+"The eternal night-it surely seemed eternal to us-wore its lagging hours
+away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east.  As the light
+grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of life, one
+after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from his
+forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out of the windows
+upon the cheerless prospect.  It was cheer less, indeed!-not a living
+thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a vast white
+desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the
+wind--a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above.
+
+"All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much.  Another
+lingering dreary night--and hunger.
+
+"Another dawning--another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger,
+hopeless watching for succor that could not come.  A night of restless
+slumber, filled with dreams of feasting--wakings distressed with the
+gnawings of hunger.
+
+"The fourth day came and went--and the fifth!  Five days of dreadful
+imprisonment!  A savage hunger looked out at every eye.  There was in it
+a sign of awful import--the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely
+shaping itself in every heart--a something which no tongue dared yet to
+frame into words.
+
+"The sixth day passed--the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and
+hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death.  It must
+out now!  That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready
+to leap from every lip at last!  Nature had been taxed to the utmost--she
+must yield.  RICHARD H. GASTON of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous, and pale,
+rose up.  All knew what was coming.  All prepared--every emotion, every
+semblance of excitement--was smothered--only a calm, thoughtful
+seriousness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild.
+
+"'Gentlemen: It cannot be delayed longer!  The time is at hand!  We must
+determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest!'
+
+"MR. JOHN J. WILLIAMS of Illinois rose and said: ' Gentlemen--I nominate
+the Rev. James Sawyer of Tennessee.'
+
+"MR. Wm. R. ADAMS of Indiana said: 'I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote of New
+York.'
+
+"MR. CHARLES J. LANGDON: 'I nominate Mr. Samuel A.  Bowen of St. Louis.'
+
+"MR. SLOTE: 'Gentlemen--I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A. Van
+Nostrand, Jun., of New Jersey.'
+
+"MR. GASTON: 'If there be no objection, the gentleman's desire will be
+acceded to.'
+
+"MR. VAN NOSTRAND objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected.
+The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and
+refused upon the same grounds.
+
+"MR. A. L. BASCOM of Ohio: 'I move that the nominations now close, and
+that the House proceed to an election by ballot.'
+
+"MR. SAWYER: 'Gentlemen--I protest earnestly against these proceedings.
+They are, in every way, irregular and unbecoming.  I must beg to move
+that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the meeting
+and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the
+business before us understandingly.'
+
+"MR. BELL of Iowa: 'Gentlemen--I object.  This is no time to stand upon
+forms and ceremonious observances.  For more than seven days we have been
+without food.  Every moment we lose in idle discussion increases our
+distress.  I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made--every
+gentleman present is, I believe--and I, for one, do not see why we should
+not proceed at once to elect one or more of them.  I wish to offer a
+resolution--'
+
+"MR. GASTON: 'It would be objected to, and have to lie over one day under
+the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid.  The
+gentleman from New Jersey--'
+
+"MR. VAN NOSTRAND: 'Gentlemen--I am a stranger among you; I have not
+sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a
+delicacy--'
+
+"MR. MORGAN Of Alabama (interrupting): 'I move the previous question.'
+
+"The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course.  The
+motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen
+chairman, Mr. Blake, secretary, Messrs.  Holcomb, Dyer, and Baldwin a
+committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the
+committee in making selections.
+
+"A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucusing
+followed.  At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the
+committee reported in favor of Messrs. George Ferguson of Kentucky,
+Lucien Herrman of Louisiana, and W. Messick of Colorado as candidates.
+The report was accepted.
+
+"MR. ROGERS of Missouri: 'Mr. President The report being properly before
+the House now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of Mr.
+Herrman that of Mr. Lucius Harris of St.  Louis, who is well and
+honorably known to us all.  I do not wish to be understood as casting the
+least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentleman
+from Louisiana far from it.  I respect and esteem him as much as any
+gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us can be blind to the
+fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here
+than any among us--none of us can be blind to the fact that the committee
+has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or a graver
+fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however pure
+his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him--'
+
+"THE CHAIR: 'The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat.  The Chair
+cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned save by the
+regular course, under the rules.  What action will the House take upon
+the gentleman's motion?'
+
+"MR. HALLIDAY of Virginia: 'I move to further amend the report by
+substituting Mr. Harvey Davis of Oregon for Mr. Messick.  It may be urged
+by gentlemen that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have
+rendered Mr.  Davis tough; but, gentlemen, is this a time to cavil at
+toughness?  Is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles?  Is this
+a time to dispute about matters of paltry significance?  No, gentlemen,
+bulk is what we desire--substance, weight, bulk--these are the supreme
+requisites now--not talent, not genius, not education.  I insist upon my
+motion.'
+
+"MR. MORGAN (excitedly): 'Mr.  Chairman--I do most strenuously object to
+this amendment.  The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is
+bulky only in bone--not in flesh.  I ask the gentleman from Virginia if
+it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance? if he would delude us
+with shadows?  if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonian specter?
+I ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can
+gaze into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant
+hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us?  I ask him
+if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark
+future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this
+tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from
+Oregon's hospitable shores?  Never!' [Applause.]
+
+"The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery debate, and lost.  Mr.
+Harris was substituted on the first amendment.  The balloting then began.
+Five ballots were held without a choice.  On the sixth, Mr.  Harris was
+elected, all voting for him but himself.  It was then moved that his
+election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in
+consequence of his again voting against himself.
+
+"MR. RADWAY moved that the House now take up the remaining candidates,
+and go into an election for breakfast.  This was carried.
+
+"On the first ballot--there was a tie, half the members favoring one
+candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account
+of his superior size.  The President gave the casting vote for the
+latter, Mr. Messick.  This decision created considerable dissatisfaction
+among the friends of Mr. Ferguson, the defeated candidate, and there was
+some talk of demanding a new ballot; but in the midst of it a motion to
+adjourn was carried, and the meeting broke up at once.
+
+"The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson
+faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then,
+when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr.
+Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds.
+
+"We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car-seats, and sat down
+with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our
+vision for seven torturing days.  How changed we were from what we had
+been a few short hours before!  Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger,
+feverish anxiety, desperation, then; thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep
+for utterance now.  That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful
+life.  The winds howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison house,
+but they were powerless to distress us any more.  I liked Harris.  He
+might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man
+ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree
+of satisfaction.  Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored,
+but for genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fiber, give me Harris.
+Messick had his good points--I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish
+to do it but he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be,
+sir--not a bit.  Lean?--why, bless me!--and tough?  Ah, he was very
+tough!  You could not imagine it--you could never imagine anything like
+it."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that--"
+
+"Do not interrupt me, please.  After breakfast we elected a man by the
+name of Walker, from Detroit, for supper.  He was very good.  I wrote his
+wife so afterward.  He was worthy of all praise.  I shall always remember
+Walker.  He was a little rare, but very good.  And then the next morning
+we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I
+ever sat down to handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages
+fluently a perfect gentleman he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly
+juicy.  For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud,
+there is no question about it--old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture
+the reality.  I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I
+will wait for another election.  And Grimes of Illinois said, 'Gentlemen,
+I will wait also.  When you elect a man that has something to recommend
+him, I shall be glad to join you again.'  It soon became evident that
+there was general dissatisfaction with Davis of Oregon, and so, to
+preserve the good will that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had
+Harris, an election was called, and the result of it was that Baker of
+Georgia was chosen.  He was splendid!  Well, well--after that we had
+Doolittle, and Hawkins, and McElroy (there was some complaint about
+McElroy, because he was uncommonly short and thin), and Penrod, and two
+Smiths, and Bailey (Bailey had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he
+was otherwise good), and an Indian boy, and an organ-grinder, and a
+gentleman by the name of Buckminster--a poor stick of a vagabond that
+wasn't any good for company and no account for breakfast.  We were glad
+we got him elected before relief came."
+
+"And so the blessed relief did come at last?"
+
+"Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election.  John
+Murphy was the choice, and there never was a better, I am willing to
+testify; but John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to
+succor us, and lived to marry the widow Harris--"
+
+"Relict of--"
+
+"Relict of our first choice.  He married her, and is happy and respected
+and prosperous yet.  Ah, it was like a novel, sir--it was like a romance.
+This is my stopping-place, sir; I must bid you goodby.  Any time that you
+can make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be glad to
+have you.  I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you.
+I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir.  Good day, sir,
+and a pleasant journey."
+
+He was gone.  I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my
+life.  But in my soul I was glad he was gone.  With all his gentleness of
+manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye
+upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and
+that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly
+stood still!
+
+I was bewildered beyond description.  I did not doubt his word; I could
+not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness
+of truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my
+thoughts into hopeless confusion.  I saw the conductor looking at me.
+I said, "Who is that man?"
+
+"He was a member of Congress once, and a good one.  But he got caught in
+a snow-drift in the cars, and like to have been starved to death.  He got
+so frost-bitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of
+something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three
+months afterward.  He is all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when
+he gets on that old subject he never stops till he has eat up that whole
+car-load of people he talks about.  He would have finished the crowd by
+this time, only he had to get out here.  He has got their names as pat as
+A B C.  When he gets them all eat up but himself, he always says: 'Then
+the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived; and there
+being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no
+objections offered, I resigned.  Thus I am here.'"
+
+I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to
+the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a
+bloodthirsty cannibal.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED" --[Written about 1865.]
+
+Being the only true and reliable account ever published; taken from the
+Roman "Daily Evening Fasces," of the date of that tremendous occurrence.
+
+Nothing in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfaction as
+gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder and writing
+them up with aggravating circumstantiality.  He takes a living delight in
+this labor of love--for such it is to him, especially if he knows that
+all the other papers have gone to press, and his will be the only one
+that will contain the dreadful intelligence.  A feeling of regret has
+often come over me that I was not reporting in Rome when Caesar was
+killed--reporting on an evening paper, and the only one in the city, and
+getting at least twelve hours ahead of the morning-paper boys with this
+most magnificent "item" that ever fell to the lot of the craft.  Other
+events have happened as startling as this, but none that possessed so
+peculiarly all the characteristics of the favorite "item" of the present
+day, magnified into grandeur and sublimity by the high rank, fame, and
+social and political standing of the actors in it.
+
+However, as I was not permitted to report Caesar's assassination in the
+regular way, it has at least afforded me rare satisfaction to translate
+the following able account of it from the original Latin of the Roman
+Daily Evening Fasces of that date--second edition:
+
+
+Our usually quiet city of Rome was thrown into a state of wild excitement
+yesterday by the occurrence of one of those bloody affrays which sicken
+the heart and fill the soul with fear, while they inspire all thinking
+men with forebodings for the future of a city where human life is held so
+cheaply and the gravest laws are so openly set at defiance.  As the
+result of that affray, it is our painful duty, as public journalists, to
+record the death of one of our most esteemed citizens--a man whose name
+is known wherever this paper circulates, and where fame it has been our
+pleasure and our privilege to extend, and also to protect from the tongue
+of slander and falsehood, to the best of our poor ability.  We refer to
+Mr. J. Caesar, the Emperor-elect.
+
+The facts of the case, as nearly as our reporter could determine them
+from the conflicting statements of eye-witnesses, were about as follows:-
+The affair was an election row, of course.  Nine-tenths of the ghastly
+butcheries that disgrace the city nowadays grow out of the bickerings and
+jealousies and animosities engendered by these accursed elections.  Rome
+would be the gainer by it if her very constables were elected to serve a
+century; for in our experience we have never even been able to choose a
+dog-pelter without celebrating the event with a dozen knockdowns and a
+general cramming of the station-house with drunken vagabonds overnight.
+It is said that when the immense majority for Caesar at the polls in the
+market was declared the other day, and the crown was offered to that
+gentleman, even his amazing unselfishness in refusing it three times was
+not sufficient to save him from the whispered insults of such men as
+Casca, of the Tenth Ward, and other hirelings of the disappointed
+candidate, hailing mostly from the Eleventh and Thirteenth and other
+outside districts, who were overheard speaking ironically and
+contemptuously of Mr. Caesar's conduct upon that occasion.
+
+We are further informed that there are many among us who think they are
+justified in believing that the assassination of Julius Caesar was a put-
+up thing--a cut-and-dried arrangement, hatched by Marcus Brutus and a lot
+of his hired roughs, and carried out only too faithfully according to the
+program.  Whether there be good grounds for this suspicion or not, we
+leave to the people to judge for themselves, only asking that they will
+read the following account of the sad occurrence carefully and
+dispassionately before they render that judgment.
+
+The Senate was already in session, and Caesar was coming down the street
+toward the capitol, conversing with some personal friends, and followed,
+as usual, by a large number of citizens.  Just as he was passing in front
+of Demosthenes and Thucydides' drug store, he was observing casually to a
+gentleman, who, our informant thinks, is a fortune-teller, that the Ides
+of March were come.  The reply was, "Yes, they are come, but not gone
+yet."  At this moment Artemidorus stepped up and passed the time of day,
+and asked Caesar to read a schedule or a tract or something of the kind,
+which he had brought for his perusal.  Mr. Decius Brutus also said
+something about an "humble suit" which he wanted read.  Artexnidorus
+begged that attention might be paid to his first, because it was of
+personal consequence to Caesar.  The latter replied that what concerned
+himself should be read last, or words to that effect.  Artemidorus begged
+and beseeched him to read the paper instantly! --[Mark that: It is hinted
+by William Shakespeare, who saw the beginning and the end of the
+unfortunate affray, that this "schedule" was simply a note discovering to
+Caesar that a plot was brewing to take his life.]--  However, Caesar
+shook him off, and refused to read any petition in the street.  He then
+entered the capitol, and the crowd followed him.
+
+About this time the following conversation was overheard, and we consider
+that, taken in connection with the events which succeeded it, it bears an
+appalling significance:  Mr. Papilius Lena remarked to George W. Cassias
+(commonly known as the "Nobby Boy of the Third Ward"), a bruiser in the
+pay of the Opposition, that he hoped his enterprise to-day might thrive;
+and when Cassias asked "What enterprise?" he only closed his left eye
+temporarily and said with simulated indifference, "Fare you well," and
+sauntered toward Caesar.  Marcus Brutus, who is suspected of being the
+ringleader of the band that killed Caesar, asked what it was that Lena
+had said.  Cassias told him, and added in a low tone, "I fear our purpose
+is discovered."
+
+Brutus told his wretched accomplice to keep an eye on Lena, and a moment
+after Cassias urged that lean and hungry vagrant, Casca, whose reputation
+here is none of the best, to be sudden, for he feared prevention.  He
+then turned to Brutus, apparently much excited, and asked what should be
+done, and swore that either he or Caesar would never turn back--he would
+kill himself first.  At this time Caesar was talking to some of the back-
+country members about the approaching fall elections, and paying little
+attention to what was going on around him.  Billy Trebonius got into
+conversation with the people's friend and Caesar's--Mark Antony--and
+under some pretense or other got him away, and Brutus, Decius, Casca,
+Cinna, Metellus Cimber, and others of the gang of infamous desperadoes
+that infest Rome at present, closed around the doomed Caesar.  Then
+Metellus Cimber knelt down and begged that his brother might be recalled
+from banishment, but Caesar rebuked him for his fawning conduct, and
+refused to grant his petition.  Immediately, at Cimber's request, first
+Brutus and then Cassias begged for the return of the banished Publius;
+but Caesar still refused.  He said he could not be moved; that he was as
+fixed as the North Star, and proceeded to speak in the most complimentary
+terms of the firmness of that star and its steady character.  Then he
+said he was like it, and he believed he was the only man in the country
+that was; therefore, since he was "constant" that Cimber should be
+banished, he was also "constant" that he should stay banished, and he'd
+be hanged if he didn't keep him so!
+
+Instantly seizing upon this shallow pretext for a fight, Casca sprang at
+Caesar and struck him with a dirk, Caesar grabbing him by the arm with
+his right hand, and launching a blow straight from the shoulder with his
+left, that sent the reptile bleeding to the earth.  He then backed up
+against Pompey's statue, and squared himself to receive his assailants.
+Cassias and Cimber and Cinna rushed, upon him with their daggers drawn,
+and the former succeeded in inflicting a wound upon his body; but before
+he could strike again, and before either of the others could strike at
+all, Caesar stretched the three miscreants at his feet with as many blows
+of his powerful fist.  By this time the Senate was in an indescribable
+uproar; the throng of citizens is the lobbies had blockaded the doors in
+their frantic efforts to escape from the building, the sergeant-at-arms
+and his assistants were struggling with the assassins, venerable senators
+had cast aside their encumbering robes, and were leaping over benches and
+flying down the aisles in wild confusion toward the shelter of the
+committee-rooms, and a thousand voices were shouting "Po-lice!  Po-lice!"
+in discordant tones that rose above the frightful din like shrieking
+winds above the roaring of a tempest.  And amid it all great Caesar stood
+with his back against the statue, like a lion at bay, and fought his
+assailants weaponless and hand to hand, with the defiant bearing and the
+unwavering courage which he had shown before on many a bloody field.
+Billy Trebonius and Caius Legarius struck him with their daggers and
+fell, as their brother-conspirators before them had fallen.  But at last,
+when Caesar saw his old friend Brutus step forward armed with a murderous
+knife, it is said he seemed utterly overpowered with grief and amazement,
+and, dropping his invincible left arm by his side, he hid his face in the
+folds of his mantle and received the treacherous blow without an effort
+to stay the hand that gave it.  He only said, "Et tu, Brute?" and fell
+lifeless on the marble pavement.
+
+We learn that the coat deceased had on when he was killed was the same
+one he wore in his tent on the afternoon of the day he overcame the
+Nervii, and that when it was removed from the corpse it was found to be
+cut and gashed in no less than seven different places.  There was nothing
+in the pockets.  It will be exhibited at the coroner's inquest, and will
+be damning proof of the fact of the killing.  These latter facts may be
+relied on, as we get them from Mark Antony, whose position enables him to
+learn every item of news connected with the one subject of absorbing
+interest of-to-day.
+
+LATER: While the coroner was summoning a jury, Mark Antony and other
+friends of the late Caesar got hold of the body, and lugged it off to the
+Forum, and at last accounts Antony and Brutus were making speeches over
+it and raising such a row among the people that, as we go to press, the
+chief of police is satisfied there is going to be a riot, and is taking
+measures accordingly.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WIDOW'S PROTEST
+
+One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice (said the
+banker's clerk) was there in Corning during the war.  Dan Murphy enlisted
+as a private, and fought very bravely.  The boys all liked him, and when
+a wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was too heavy
+work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a sutler.  He
+made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for him.  She was
+a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to keep money
+when she got it.  She didn't waste a penny.
+
+On the contrary, she began to get miserly as her bank-account grew.  She
+grieved to part with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working
+life she had known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and
+without a dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering
+so again.  Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their
+esteem and respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she
+would like to have him embalmed and sent home; when you know the usual
+custom was to dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then
+inform his friends what had become of him.  Mrs.  Murphy jumped to the
+conclusion that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her
+dead husband, and so she telegraphed "Yes."  It was at the "wake" that
+the bill for embalming arrived and was presented to the widow.
+
+She uttered a wild, sad wail that pierced every heart, and said,
+"Sivinty-foive dollars for stooffin' Dan, blister their sowls!  Did thim
+divils suppose I was goin' to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such
+expinsive curiassities !"
+
+The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST --[Written about 1866.]
+
+There was a fellow traveling around in that country," said Mr.
+Nickerson, "with a moral-religious show--a sort of scriptural panorama--
+and he hired a wooden-headed old slab to play the piano for him.  After
+the first night's performance the showman says:
+
+"'My friend, you seem to know pretty much all the tunes there are, and
+you worry along first rate.  But then, didn't you notice that sometimes
+last night the piece you happened to be playing was a little rough on the
+proprieties, so to speak--didn't seem to jibe with the general gait of
+the picture that was passing at the time, as it were--was a little
+foreign to the subject, you know--as if you didn't either trump or follow
+suit, you understand?'
+
+"'Well, no,' the fellow said; 'he hadn't noticed, but it might be; he had
+played along just as it came handy.'
+
+"So they put it up that the simple old dummy was to keep his eye on the
+panorama after that, and as soon as a stunning picture was reeled out he
+was to fit it to a dot with a piece of music that would help the audience
+to get the idea of the subject, and warm them up like a camp-meeting
+revival.  That sort of thing would corral their sympathies, the showman
+said.
+
+"There was a big audience that night-mostly middle-aged and old people
+who belong to the church, and took a strong interest in Bible matters,
+and the balance were pretty much young bucks and heifers--they always
+come out strong on panoramas, you know, because it gives them a chance to
+taste one another's complexions in the dark.
+
+"Well, the showman began to swell himself up for his lecture, and the old
+mud-Jobber tackled the piano and ran his fingers up and down once or
+twice to see that she was all right, and the fellows behind the curtain
+commenced to grind out the panorama.  The showman balanced his weight on
+his right foot, and propped his hands over his hips, and flung his eyes
+over his shoulder at the scenery, and said:
+
+"'Ladies and gentlemen, the painting now before you illustrates the
+beautiful and touching parable of the Prodigal Son.  Observe the happy
+expression just breaking over the features of the poor, suffering youth--
+so worn and weary with his long march; note also the ecstasy beaming from
+the uplifted countenance of the aged father, and the joy that sparkles in
+the eyes of the excited group of youths and maidens, and seems ready to
+burst into the welcoming chorus from their lips.  The lesson, my friends,
+is as solemn and instructive as the story is tender and beautiful.'
+
+"The mud-Jobber was all ready, and when the second speech was finished,
+struck up:
+
+                    "Oh, we'll all get blind drunk
+                    When Johnny comes marching home!
+
+"Some of the people giggled, and some groaned a little.  The showman
+couldn't say a word; he looked at the pianist sharp, but he was all
+lovely and serene--he didn't know there was anything out of gear.
+
+"The panorama moved on, and the showman drummed up his grit and started
+in fresh.
+
+"'Ladies and gentlemen, the fine picture now unfolding itself to your
+gaze exhibits one of the most notable events in Bible history--our
+Saviour and His disciples upon the Sea of Galilee.  How grand, how awe-
+inspiring are the reflections which the subject invokes!  What sublimity
+of faith is revealed to us in this lesson from the sacred writings!  The
+Saviour rebukes the angry waves, and walks securely upon the bosom of the
+deep!'
+
+"All around the house they were whispering, 'Oh, how lovely, how
+beautiful!' and the orchestra let himself out again:
+
+                    "A life on the ocean wave,
+                    And a home on the rolling deep!
+
+"There was a good deal of honest snickering turned on this time, and
+considerable groaning, and one or two old deacons got up and went out.
+The showman grated his teeth, and cursed the piano man to himself; but
+the fellow sat there like a knot on a log, and seemed to think he was
+doing first-rate.
+
+"After things got quiet the showman thought he would make one more
+stagger at it, anyway, though his confidence was beginning to get mighty
+shaky.  The supes started the panorama grinding along again, and he says:
+
+"'Ladies and gentlemen, this exquisite painting represents the raising of
+Lazarus from the dead by our Saviour.  The subject has been handled with
+marvelous skill by the artist, and such touching sweetness and tenderness
+of expression has he thrown into it that I have known peculiarly
+sensitive persons to be even affected to tears by looking at it.  Observe
+the half-confused, half-inquiring look upon the countenance of the
+awakened Lazarus.  Observe, also, the attitude and expression of the
+Saviour, who takes him gently by the sleeve of his shroud with one hand,
+while He points with the other toward the distant city.'
+
+"Before anybody could get off an opinion in the case the innocent old ass
+at the piano struck up:
+
+                    "Come rise up, William Ri-i-ley,
+                    And go along with me!
+
+"Whe-ew!  All the solemn old flats got up in a huff to go, and everybody
+else laughed till the windows rattled.
+
+"The showman went down and grabbed the orchestra and shook him up and
+says:
+
+"'That lets you out, you know, you chowder-headed old clam.  Go to the
+doorkeeper and get your money, and cut your stick--vamose the ranch!
+Ladies and gentlemen, circumstances over which I have no control compel
+me prematurely to dismiss the house.'"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CURING A COLD --[Written about 1864]
+
+It is a good thing, perhaps, to write for the amusement of the public,
+but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction,
+their profit, their actual and tangible benefit.  The latter is the sole
+object of this article.  If it prove the means of restoring to health one
+solitary sufferer among my race, of lighting up once more the fire of
+hope and joy in his faded eyes, or bringing back to his dead heart again
+the quick, generous impulses of other days, I shall be amply rewarded for
+my labor; my soul will be permeated with the sacred delight a Christian.
+feels when he has done a good, unselfish deed.
+
+Having led a pure and blameless life, I am justified in believing that no
+man who knows me will reject the suggestions I am about to make, out of
+fear that I am trying to deceive him.  Let the public do itself the honor
+to read my experience in doctoring a cold, as herein set forth, and then
+follow in my footsteps.
+
+When the White House was burned in Virginia City, I lost my home, my
+happiness, my constitution, and my trunk.  The loss of the two first
+named articles was a matter of no great consequence, since a home without
+a mother, or a sister, or a distant young female relative in it, to
+remind you, by putting your soiled linen out of sight and taking your
+boots down off the mantelpiece, that there are those who think about you
+and care for you, is easily obtained.  And I cared nothing for the loss
+of my happiness, because, not being a poet, it could not be possible that
+melancholy would abide with me long.  But to lose a good constitution and
+a better trunk were serious misfortunes.  On the day of the fire my
+constitution succumbed to a severe cold, caused by undue exertion in
+getting ready to do something.  I suffered to no purpose, too, because
+the plan I was figuring at for the extinguishing of the fire was so
+elaborate that I never got it completed until the middle of the following
+week.
+
+The first time I began to sneeze, a friend told me to go and bathe my
+feet in hot water and go to bed.  I did so.  Shortly afterward, another
+friend advised me to get up and take a cold shower-bath.  I did that
+also.  Within the hour, another friend assured me that it was policy to
+"feed a cold and starve a fever."  I had both.  So I thought it best to
+fill myself up for the cold, and then keep dark and let the fever starve
+awhile.
+
+In a case of, this kind, I seldom do things by halves; I ate pretty
+heartily; I conferred my custom upon a stranger who had just opened his
+restaurant that morning; he waited near me in respectful silence until I
+had finished feeding my cold, when he inquired if the people about
+Virginia City were much afflicted with colds?  I told him I thought they
+were.  He then went out and took in his sign.
+
+I started down toward the office, and on the way encountered another
+bosom friend, who told me that a quart of salt-water, taken warm, would
+come as near curing a cold as anything in the world.  I hardly thought I
+had room for it, but I tried it anyhow.  The result was surprising.  I
+believed I had thrown up my immortal soul.
+
+Now, as I am giving my experience only for the benefit of those who are
+troubled with the distemper I am writing about, I feel that they will see
+the propriety of my cautioning them against following such portions of it
+as proved inefficient with me, and acting upon this conviction, I warn
+them against warm salt-water.  It may be a good enough remedy, but I
+think it is too severe.  If I had another cold in the head, and there
+were no course left me but to take either an earthquake or a quart of
+warm saltwater, I would take my chances on the earthquake.
+
+After the storm which had been raging in my stomach had subsided, and no
+more good Samaritans happening along, I went on borrowing handkerchiefs
+again and blowing them to atoms, as had been my custom in the early
+stages of my cold, until I came across a lady who had just arrived from
+over the plains, and who said she had lived in a part of the country
+where doctors were scarce, and had from necessity acquired considerable
+skill in the treatment of simple "family complaints."  I knew she must
+have had much experience, for she appeared to be a hundred and fifty
+years old.
+
+She mixed a decoction composed of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and
+various other drugs, and instructed me to take a wine-glass full of it
+every fifteen minutes.  I never took but one dose; that was enough; it
+robbed me of all moral principle, and awoke every unworthy impulse of my
+nature.  Under its malign influence my brain conceived miracles of
+meanness, but my hands were too feeble to execute them; at that time, had
+it not been that my strength had surrendered to a succession of assaults
+from infallible remedies for my cold, I am satisfied that I would have
+tried to rob the graveyard.  Like most other people, I often feel mean,
+and act accordingly; but until I took that medicine I had never reveled
+in such supernatural depravity, and felt proud of it.  At the end of two
+days I was ready to go to doctoring again.  I took a few more unfailing
+remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs.
+
+I got to coughing incessantly, and my voice fell below zero; I conversed
+in a thundering bass, two octaves below my natural tone; I could only
+compass my regular nightly repose by coughing myself down to a state of
+utter exhaustion, and then the moment I began to talk in my sleep, my
+discordant voice woke me up again.
+
+My case grew more and more serious every day.  A Plain gin was
+recommended; I took it.  Then gin and molasses; I took that also.  Then
+gin and onions; I added the onions, and took all three.  I detected no
+particular result, however, except that I had acquired a breath like a
+buzzard's.
+
+I found I had to travel for my health.  I went to Lake Bigler with my
+reportorial comrade, Wilson.  It is gratifying to me to reflect that we
+traveled in considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my
+friend took all his baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk
+handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype of his grandmother.  We sailed and
+hunted and fished and danced all day, and I doctored my cough all night.
+By managing in this way, I made out to improve every hour in the twenty-
+four.  But my disease continued to grow worse.
+
+A sheet-bath was recommended.  I had never refused a remedy yet, and it
+seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a
+sheet-bath, notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it
+was.  It was administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty.
+My breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a
+thousand yards of it) soaked in ice-water, was wound around me until I
+resembled a swab for a Columbiad.
+
+It is a cruel expedient.  When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh,
+it makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men
+do in the death-agony.  It froze the marrow in my bones and stopped the
+beating of my heart.  I thought my time had come.
+
+Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a
+negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp,
+and came near being drowned.  He floundered around, though, and finally
+rose up out of the water considerably strangled and furiously angry, and
+started ashore at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with
+great asperity, that "one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to
+get killed wid jis' such damn foolishness as dis!"
+
+Never take a sheet-bath-never.  Next to meeting a lady acquaintance who,
+for reasons best known to herself, don't see you when she looks at you,
+and don't know you when she does see you, it is the most uncomfortable
+thing in the world.
+
+But, as I was saying, when the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough,
+a lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my
+breast.  I believe that would have cured me effectually, if it had not
+been for young Wilson.  When I went to bed, I put my mustard plaster--
+which was a very gorgeous one, eighteen inches square--where I could
+reach it when I was ready for it.  But young Wilson got hungry in the
+night, and here is food for the imagination.
+
+After sojourning a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and,
+besides the steam-baths, I took a lot of the vilest medicines that were
+ever concocted.  They would have cured me, but I had to go back to
+Virginia City, where, notwithstanding the variety of new remedies I
+absorbed every day, I managed to aggravate my disease by carelessness and
+undue exposure.
+
+I finally concluded to visit San Francisco, and the, first day I got
+there a lady at the hotel told me to drink a quart of whisky every
+twenty-four hours, and a friend up-town recommended precisely the same
+course.  Each advised me to take a quart; that made half a gallon.  I did
+it, and still live.
+
+Now, with the kindest motives in the world, I offer for the consideration
+of consumptive patients the variegated course of treatment I have lately
+gone through.  Let them try it; if it don't cure, it can't more than kill
+them.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION
+
+--[Published at the time of the "Comet Scare" in the summer of 1874]
+
+[We have received the following advertisement, but, inasmuch as it
+concerns a matter of deep and general interest, we feel fully justified
+in inserting it in our reading-columns.  We are confident that our
+conduct in this regard needs only explanation, not apology.--Ed., N. Y.
+Herald.]
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT
+
+This is to inform the public that in connection with Mr. Barnum I have
+leased the comet for a term, of years; and I desire also to solicit the
+public patronage in favor of a beneficial enterprise which we have in
+view.
+
+We propose to fit up comfortable, and even luxurious, accommodations in
+the comet for as many persons as will honor us with their patronage, and
+make an extended excursion among the heavenly bodies.  We shall prepare
+1,000,000 state-rooms in the tail of the comet (with hot and cold water,
+gas, looking-glass, parachute, umbrella, etc., in each), and shall
+construct more if we meet with a sufficiently generous encouragement.
+We shall have billiard-rooms, card-rooms, music-rooms, bowling-alleys and
+many spacious theaters and free libraries; and on the main deck we
+propose to have a driving park, with upward of 100,000 miles of roadway
+in it.  We shall publish daily newspapers also.
+
+
+                          DEPARTURE OF THE COMET
+
+The comet will leave New York at 10 P.M.  on the 20th inst., and
+therefore it will be desirable that the passengers be on board by eight
+at the latest, to avoid confusion in getting under way.  It is not known
+whether passports will be necessary or not, but it is deemed best that
+passengers provide them, and so guard against all contingencies.  No dogs
+will be allowed on board.  This rule has been made in deference to the
+existing state of feeling regarding these animals, and will be strictly
+adhered to.  The safety of the passengers will in all ways be jealously
+looked to.  A substantial iron railing will be put up all around the
+comet, and no one will be allowed to go to the edge and look over unless
+accompanied by either my partner or myself.
+
+
+                            THE POSTAL SERVICE
+
+will be of the completest character.  Of course the telegraph, and the
+telegraph only, will be employed; consequently friends occupying state-
+rooms 20,000,000 and even 30,000,000 miles apart will be able to send a
+message and receive a reply inside of eleven days.  Night messages will
+be half-rate.  The whole of this vast postal system will be under the
+personal superintendence of Mr. Hale of Maine.  Meals served at all
+hours.  Meals served in staterooms charged extra.
+
+Hostility is not apprehended from any great planet, but we have thought
+it best to err on the safe side, and therefore have provided a proper
+number of mortars, siege-guns, and boarding-pikes.  History shows that
+small, isolated communities, such as the people of remote islands, are
+prone to be hostile to strangers, and so the same may be the case with
+
+
+                         THE INHABITANTS OF STARS
+
+of the tenth or twentieth magnitude.  We shall in no case wantonly offend
+the people of any star, but shall treat all alike with urbanity and
+kindliness, never conducting ourselves toward an asteroid after a fashion
+which we could not venture to assume toward Jupiter or Saturn.  I repeat
+that we shall not wantonly offend any star; but at the same time we shall
+promptly resent any injury that may be done us, or any insolence offered
+us, by parties or governments residing in any star in the firmament.
+Although averse to the shedding of blood, we shall still hold this course
+rigidly and fearlessly, not only toward single stars, but toward
+constellations.  We shall hope to leave a good impression of America
+behind us in every nation we visit, from Venus to Uranus.  And, at all
+events, if we cannot inspire love we shall at least compel respect for
+our country wherever we go.  We shall take with us, free of charge,
+
+
+                      A GREAT FORCE OF MISSIONARIES,
+
+and shed the true light upon all the celestial orbs which, physically
+aglow, are yet morally in darkness.  Sunday-schools will be established
+wherever practicable.  Compulsory education will also be introduced.
+
+The comet will visit Mars first, and proceed to Mercury, Jupiter, Venus,
+and Saturn.  Parties connected with the government of the District of
+Columbia and with the former city government of New York, who may desire
+to inspect the rings, will be allowed time and every facility.  Every
+star of prominent magnitude will be visited, and time allowed for
+excursions to points of interest inland.
+
+
+                               THE DOG STAR
+
+has been stricken from the program.  Much time will be spent in the Great
+Bear, and, indeed, in every constellation of importance.  So, also, with
+the Sun and Moon and the Milky Pay, otherwise the Gulf Stream of the
+Skies.  Clothing suitable for wear in the sun should be provided.  Our
+program has been so arranged that we shall seldom go more than
+100,000,000 of miles at a time without stopping at some star.  This will
+necessarily make the stoppages frequent and preserve the interest of the
+tourist.  Baggage checked through to any point on the route.  Parties
+desiring to make only a part of the proposed tour, and thus save expense,
+may stop over at any star they choose and wait for the return voyage.
+
+After visiting all the most celebrated stars and constellations in our
+system and personally, inspecting the remotest sparks that even the most
+powerful telescope can now detect in the firmament, we shall proceed with
+good heart upon
+
+
+                           A STUPENDOUS VOYAGE
+
+of discovery among the countless whirling worlds that make turmoil in the
+mighty wastes of space that stretch their solemn solitudes, their
+unimaginable vastness billions upon billions of miles away beyond the
+farthest verge of telescopic vision, till by comparison the little
+sparkling vault we used to gaze at on Earth shall seem like a remembered
+phosphorescent flash of spangles which some tropical voyager's prow
+stirred into life for a single instant, and which ten thousand miles of
+phosphorescent seas and tedious lapse of time had since diminished to an
+incident utterly trivial in his recollection.  Children occupying seats
+at the first table will be charged full fare.
+
+
+                             FIRST-CLASS FARE
+
+from the Earth to Uranus, including visits to the Sun and Moon and all
+the principal planets on the route, will be charged at the low rate of
+$2 for every 50,000,000 miles of actual travel.  A great reduction will
+be made where parties wish to make the round trip.  This comet is new and
+in thorough repair and is now on her first voyage.  She is confessedly
+the fastest on the line.  She makes 20,000,000 miles a day, with her
+present facilities; but, with a picked American crew and good weather,
+we are confident we can get 40,000,000 out of her.  Still, we shall never
+push her to a dangerous speed, and we shall rigidly prohibit racing with
+other comets.  Passengers desiring to diverge at any point or return will
+be transferred to other comets.  We make close connections at all
+principal points with all reliable lines.  Safety can be depended upon.
+It is not to be denied that the heavens are infested with
+
+
+                          OLD RAMSHACKLE COMETS
+
+that have not been inspected or overhauled in 10,000 years, and which
+ought long ago to have been destroyed or turned into hail-barges, but
+with these we have no connection whatever.  Steerage passengers not
+allowed abaft the main hatch.
+
+Complimentary round-trip tickets have been tendered to General Butler,
+Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Richardson, and other eminent gentlemen, whose public
+services have entitled them to the rest and relaxation of a voyage of
+this kind.  Parties desiring to make the round trip will have extra
+accommodation.  The entire voyage will be completed, and the passengers
+landed in New York again, on the 14th of December, 1991.  This is, at
+least, forty years quicker than any other comet can do it in.  Nearly all
+the back-pay members contemplate making the round trip with us in case
+their constituents will allow them a holiday.  Every harmless amusement
+will be allowed on board, but no pools permitted on the run of the comet
+--no gambling of any kind.  All fixed stars will be respected by us, but
+such stars as seem, to need fixing we shall fix.  If it makes trouble, we
+shall be sorry, but firm.
+
+Mr. Coggia having leased his comet to us, she will no longer be called by
+his name, but by my partner's.  N. B.--Passengers by paying double fare
+will be entitled to a share in all the new stars, suns, moons, comets,
+meteors, and magazines of thunder and lightning we may discover.  Patent-
+medicine people will take notice that
+
+
+                         WE CARRY BULLETIN-BOARDS
+
+and a paint-brush along for use in the constellations, and are open to
+terms.  Cremationists are reminded that we are going straight to--some
+hot places--and are open to terms.  To other parties our enterprise is a
+pleasure excursion, but individually we mean business.  We shall fly our
+comet for all it is worth.
+
+
+                         FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS,
+
+or for freight or passage, apply on board, or to my partner, but not to
+me, since I do not take charge of the comet until she is under way.
+It is necessary, at a time like this, that my mind should not be burdened
+with small business details.
+
+                                                       MARK TWAIN.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR --[Written about 1870.]
+
+A few months ago I was nominated for Governor of the great state of New
+York, to run against Mr. John T. Smith and Mr. Blank J. Blank on an
+independent ticket.  I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage
+over these gentlemen, and that was--good character.  It was easy to see
+by the newspapers that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good
+name, that time had gone by.  It was plain that in these latter years
+they had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes.  But at the
+very moment that I was exalting my advantage and joying in it in secret,
+there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort "riling" the deeps of my
+happiness, and that was--the having to hear my name bandied about in
+familiar connection with those of such people.  I grew more and more
+disturbed.  Finally I wrote my grandmother about it.  Her answer came
+quick and sharp.  She said:
+
+     You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed
+     of--not one.  Look at the newspapers--look at them and comprehend
+     what sort of characters Messrs.  Smith and Blank are, and then see
+     if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a
+     public canvass with them.
+
+It was my very thought!  I did not sleep a single moment that night.
+But, after all, I could not recede.
+
+I was fully committed, and must go on with the fight.  As I was looking
+listlessly over the papers at breakfast I came across this paragraph,
+and I may truly say I never was so confounded before.
+
+     PERJURY.--Perhaps, now that Mr. Mark Twain is before the people as a
+     candidate for Governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to
+     be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses in Wakawak, Cochin
+     China, in 1863, the intent of which perjury being to rob a poor
+     native widow and her helpless family of a meager plantain-patch,
+     their only stay and support in their bereavement and desolation.
+     Mr. Twain owes it to himself, as well as to the great people whose
+     suffrages he asks, to clear this matter up.  Will he do it?
+
+I thought I should burst with amazement!  Such a cruel, heartless charge!
+I never had seen Cochin China!  I never had heard of Wakawak !  I didn't
+know a plantain-patch from a kangaroo!  I did not know what to do.  I was
+crazed and helpless.  I let the day slip away without doing anything at
+all.  The next morning the same paper had this--nothing more:
+
+     SIGNIFICANT.--Mr.  Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively
+     silent about the Cochin China perjury.
+
+[Mem.--During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to me in
+any other way than as "the infamous perjurer Twain."]
+
+Next came the Gazette, with this:
+
+     WANTED TO KNOW.--Will the new candidate for Governor deign to
+     explain to certain of his fellow-citizens (who are suffering to vote
+     for him!) the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Montana
+     losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these
+     things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his
+     "trunk" (newspaper he rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to
+     give him a friendly admonition for his own good, and so tarred and
+     feathered him, and rode him on a rail; and then advised him to leave
+     a permanent vacuum in the place he usually occupied in the camp.
+     Will he do this?
+
+Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that?  For I never was
+in Montana in my life.
+
+[After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as, "Twain, the Montana
+Thief."]
+
+I got to picking up papers apprehensively--much as one would lift a
+desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it.
+One day this met my eye:
+
+     THE LIE NAILED.--By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan,
+     Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr. Snub Rafferty and Mr. Catty
+     Mulligan, of Water Street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's
+     vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-
+     bearer, Blank J. Blank, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal
+     and gratuitous LIE, without a shadow of foundation in fact.  It is
+     disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to
+     to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their
+     graves, and defiling their honored names with slander.  When we
+     think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the
+     innocent relatives and friends of the deceased, we are almost driven
+     to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful
+     vengeance upon the traducer.  But no! let us leave him to the agony
+     of a lacerated conscience (though if passion should get the better
+     of the public, and in its blind fury they should do the traducer
+     bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict and
+     no court punish the perpetrators of the deed).
+
+The ingenious closing sentence had the effect of moving me out of bed
+with despatch that night, and out at the back door also, while the
+"outraged and insulted public" surged in the front way, breaking
+furniture and windows in their righteous indignation as they came,
+and taking off such property as they could carry when they went.
+And yet I can lay my hand upon the Book and say that I never slandered
+Mr. Blank's grandfather.  More: I had never even heard of him or
+mentioned him up to that day and date.
+
+[I will state, in passing, that the journal above quoted from always
+referred to me afterward as "Twain, the Body-Snatcher."]
+
+The next newspaper article that attracted my attention was the following:
+
+     A SWEET CANDIDATE.--Mr.  Mark Twain, who was to make such a
+     blighting speech at the mass-meeting of the Independents last night,
+     didn't come to time!  A telegram from his physician stated that he
+     had been knocked down by a runaway team, and his leg broken in two
+     places--sufferer lying in great agony, and so forth, and so forth,
+     and a lot more bosh of the same sort.  And the Independents tried
+     hard to swallow the wretched subterfuge, and pretend that they did
+     not know what was the real reason of the absence of the abandoned
+     creature whom they denominate their standard-bearer.  A certain man
+     was seen to reel into Mr.  Twain's hotel last night in a state of
+     beastly intoxication.  It is the imperative duty of the Independents
+     to prove that this besotted brute was not Mark Twain himself.  We
+     have them at last!  This is a case that admits of no shirking.  The
+     voice of the people demands in thunder tones, "WHO WAS THAT MAN?"
+
+It was incredible, absolutely incredible, for a moment, that it was
+really my name that was coupled with this disgraceful suspicion.  Three
+long years had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine or
+liquor or any kind.
+
+[It shows what effect the times were having on me when I say that I saw
+myself, confidently dubbed "Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain" in the next issue
+of that journal without a pang--notwithstanding I knew that with
+monotonous fidelity the paper would go on calling me so to the very end.]
+
+By this time anonymous letters were getting to be an important part of my
+mail matter.  This form was common
+
+     How about that old woman you kiked of your premises which
+     was beging.                             POL. PRY.
+
+And this:
+
+     There is things which you Have done which is unbeknowens to anybody
+     but me.  You better trot out a few dots, to yours truly, or you'll
+     hear through the papers from
+                                             HANDY ANDY.
+
+This is about the idea.  I could continue them till the reader was
+surfeited, if desirable.
+
+Shortly the principal Republican journal "convicted" me of wholesale
+bribery, and the leading Democratic paper "nailed" an aggravated case of
+blackmailing to me.
+
+[In this way I acquired two additional names: "Twain the Filthy
+Corruptionist" and "Twain the Loathsome Embracer."]
+
+By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an "answer" to all
+the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of
+my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any
+longer.   As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following
+appeared in one of the papers the very next day:
+
+     BEHOLD THE MAN!--The independent candidate still maintains silence.
+     Because he dare not speak.  Every accusation against him has been
+     amply proved, and they have been indorsed and reindorsed by his own
+     eloquent silence, till at this day he stands forever convicted.
+     Look upon your candidate, Independents!  Look upon the Infamous
+     Perjurer!  the Montana Thief!  the Body-Snatcher!  Contemplate your
+     incarnate Delirium Tremens!  your Filthy Corruptionist!  your
+     Loathsome Embracer!  Gaze upon him--ponder him well--and then say if
+     you can give your honest votes to a creature who has earned this
+     dismal array of titles by his hideous crimes, and dares not open his
+     mouth in denial of any one of them!
+
+There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so, in deep
+humiliation, I set about preparing to "answer" a mass of baseless charges
+and mean and wicked falsehoods.  But I never finished the task, for the
+very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity,
+and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all its
+inmates, because it obstructed the view from my house.  This threw me
+into a sort of panic.  Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get
+his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened.
+This drove me to the verge of distraction.  On top of this I was accused
+of employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food
+for the foundling' hospital when I warden.  I was wavering--wavering.
+And at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution
+that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children,
+of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness, were taught to rush
+onto the platform at a public meeting, and clasp me around the legs and
+call me PA!
+
+I gave it up.  I hauled down my colors and surrendered.  I was not equal
+to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the state of New York,
+and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of
+spirit signed it, "Truly yours, once a decent man, but now
+
+                    MARK TWAIN, LP., M.T., B.S., D.T., F.C., and L.E."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A MYSTERIOUS VISIT
+
+
+The first notice that was taken of me when I "settled down" recently was
+by a gentleman who said he was an assessor, and connected with the U. S.
+Internal Revenue Department.  I said I had never heard of his branch of
+business before, but I was very glad to see him all the same.  Would he
+sit down?  He sat down.  I did not know anything particular to say, and
+yet I felt that people who have arrived at the dignity of keeping house
+must be conversational, must be easy and sociable in company.  So, in
+default of anything else to say, I asked him if he was opening his shop
+in our neighborhood.
+
+He said he was.  [I did not wish to appear ignorant, but I had hoped he
+would mention what he had for sale.]
+
+I ventured to ask him "How was trade?"  And he said "So-so."
+
+I then said we would drop in, and if we liked his house as well as any
+other, we would give him our custom.
+
+He said he thought we would like his establishment well enough to confine
+ourselves to it--said he never saw anybody who would go off and hunt up
+another man in his line after trading with him once.
+
+That sounded pretty complacent, but barring that natural expression of
+villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
+
+I do not know how it came about exactly, but gradually we appeared to
+melt down and run together, conversationally speaking, and then
+everything went along as comfortably as clockwork.
+
+We talked, and talked, and talked--at least I did; and we laughed, and
+laughed, and laughed--at least he did.  But all the time I had my
+presence of mind about me--I had my native shrewdness turned on "full
+head," as the engineers say.  I was determined to find out all about his
+business in spite of his obscure answers--and I was determined I would
+have it out of him without his suspecting what I was at.  I meant to trap
+him with a deep, deep ruse.  I would tell him all about my own business,
+and he would naturally so warm to me during this seductive burst of
+confidence that he would forget himself, and tell me all about his
+affairs before he suspected what I was about.  I thought to myself, My
+son, you little know what an old fox you are dealing with.  I said:
+
+"Now you never would guess what I made lecturing this winter and last
+spring?"
+
+"No--don't believe I could, to save me.  Let me see--let me see.   About
+two thousand dollars, maybe?  But no; no, sir, I know you couldn't have
+made that much.   Say seventeen hundred, maybe?"
+
+"Ha! ha!  I knew you couldn't.  My lecturing receipts for last spring and
+this winter were fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.  What
+do you think of that?"
+
+"Why, it is amazing-perfectly amazing.  I will make a note of it.  And
+you say even this wasn't all?"
+
+"All!  Why bless you, there was my income from the Daily Warwhoop for
+four months--about--about--well, what should you say to about eight
+thousand dollars, for instance?"
+
+"Say!  Why, I should say I should like to see myself rolling in just such
+another ocean of affluence.  Eight thousand!  I'll make a note of it.
+Why man! --and on top of all this am I to understand that you had still
+more income?"
+
+"Ha! ha! ha!  Why, you're only in the suburbs of it, so to speak.
+There's my book, The Innocents Abroad price $3.50 to $5, according to the
+binding.  Listen to me.  Look me in the eye.  During the last four months
+and a half, saying nothing of sales before that, but just simply during
+the four months and a half, we've sold ninety-five thousand copies of
+that book.  Ninety-five thousand!  Think of it.  Average four dollars a
+copy, say.  It's nearly four hundred thousand dollars, my son.  I get
+half."
+
+"The suffering Moses!  I'll set that down.  Fourteen-seven-fifty--eight-
+two hundred.  Total, say--well, upon my word, the grand total is about
+two hundred and thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars!  Is that
+possible?"
+
+"Possible!  If there's any mistake it's the other way.  Two hundred and
+fourteen thousand, cash, is my income for this year if I know how to
+cipher."
+
+Then the gentleman got up to go.  It came over me most uncomfortably that
+maybe I had made my revelations for nothing, besides being flattered into
+stretching them considerably by the stranger's astonished exclamations.
+But no; at the last moment the gentleman handed me a large envelope, and
+said it contained his advertisement; and that I would find out all about
+his business in it; and that he would be happy to have my custom-would,
+in fact, be proud to have the custom of a man of such prodigious income;
+and that he used to think there were several wealthy men in the city, but
+when they came to trade with him he discovered that they barely had
+enough to live on; and that, in truth, it had been such a weary, weary
+age since he had seen a rich man face to face, and talked to him, and
+touched him with his hands, that he could hardly refrain from embracing
+me--in fact, would esteem it a great favor if I would let him embrace me.
+
+This so pleased me that I did not try to resist, but allowed this simple-
+hearted stranger to throw his arms about me and weep a few tranquilizing
+tears down the back of my neck.  Then he went his way.
+
+As soon as he was gone I opened his advertisement.  I studied it
+attentively for four minutes.  I then called up the cook, and said:
+
+"Hold me while I faint!  Let Marie turn the griddle-cakes."
+
+By and by, when I came to, I sent down to the rum-mill on the corner and
+hired an artist by the week to sit up nights and curse that stranger, and
+give me a lift occasionally in the daytime when I came to a hard place.
+
+Ah, what a miscreant he was!  His "advertisement  was nothing in the
+world.  but a wicked tax-return--a string of impertinent questions about
+my private affairs, occupying the best part of four fools-cap pages of
+fine print-questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous
+ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn't understand what the
+most of them were driving at--questions, too, that were calculated to
+make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from
+swearing to a falsehood.  I looked for a loophole, but there did not
+appear to be any.  Inquiry No. 1 covered my case as generously and as
+amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill:
+
+     What were your profits, during the past year, from any trade,
+     business, or vocation, wherever carried on?
+
+And that inquiry was backed up by thirteen others of an equally searching
+nature, the most modest of which required information as to whether I had
+committed any burglary or highway robbery, or, by any arson or other
+secret source of emolument had acquired property which was not enumerated
+in my statement of income as set opposite to inquiry No. 1.
+
+It was plain that that stranger had enabled me to make a goose of myself.
+It was very, very plain; and so I went out and hired another artist.
+By working on my vanity, the stranger had seduced me into declaring an
+income of two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars.  By law, one
+thousand dollars of this was exempt from income tax--the only relief I
+could see, and it was only a drop in the ocean.  At the legal five per
+cent., I must pay to the government the sum of ten thousand six hundred
+and fifty dollars, income tax!
+
+[I may remark, in this place, that I did not do it.]
+
+I am acquainted with a very opulent man, whose house is a palace, whose
+table is regal, whose outlays are enormous, yet a man who has no income,
+as I have often noticed by the revenue returns; and to him I went for
+advice in my distress.  He took my dreadful exhibition of receipts, he
+put on his glasses, he took his pen, and presto!--I was a pauper!  It was
+the neatest thing that ever was.  He did it simply by deftly manipulating
+the bill of "DEDUCTIONS."  He set down my "State, national, and municipal
+taxes" at so much; my "losses by shipwreck; fire, etc.," at so much; my
+"losses on sales of real estate"--on "live stock sold"--on "payments for
+rent of homestead"--on "repairs, improvements, interest"--on "previously
+taxed salary as an officer of the United States army, navy, revenue
+service," and other things.  He got astonishing "deductions" out of each
+and every one of these matters--each and every one of them.  And when he
+was done he handed me the paper, and I saw at a glance that during the
+year my income, in the way of profits, had been one thousand two hundred
+and fifty dollars and forty cents.
+
+"Now," said he, "the thousand dollars is exempt by law.  What you want to
+do is to go and swear this document in and pay tax on the two hundred and
+fifty dollars."
+
+[While he was making this speech his little boy Willie lifted a two-
+dollar greenback out of his vest pocket and vanished with it, and I would
+wager; anything that if my stranger were to call on that little boy to-
+morrow he would make a false return of his income.]
+
+"Do you," said I, "do you always work up the 'deductions' after this
+fashion in your own case, sir?"
+
+"Well, I should say so!  If it weren't for those eleven saving clauses
+under the head of 'Deductions' I should be beggared every year to support
+this hateful and wicked, this extortionate and tyrannical government."
+
+This gentleman stands away up among the very best of the solid men of the
+city--the men of moral weight, of commercial integrity, of unimpeachable,
+social spotlessness--and so I bowed to his example.  I went down to the
+revenue office, and under the accusing eyes of my old visitor I stood up
+and swore to lie after lie, fraud after fraud, villainy after villainy,
+till my soul was coated inches and inches thick with perjury, and my
+self-respect gone for ever and ever.
+
+But what of it?  It is nothing more than thousands of the richest and
+proudest, and most respected, honored, and courted men in America do
+every year.  And so I don't care.  I am not ashamed.  I shall simply,
+for the present, talk little and eschew fire-proof gloves, lest I fall
+into certain dreadful habits irrevocably.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext Sketches New and Old, by Mark Twain
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sketches New and Old, by Mark Twain
+#50 in our series by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
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+Title: Sketches New and Old
+
+Author: Mark Twain
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3189]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 16, 2001]
+[Most recently updated: November 29, 2001]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sketches New and Old, by Mark Twain
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+
+
+SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+PREFACE
+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
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never
+been in print before (such as "Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and
+Girls," the "Jumping Frog restored to the English tongue after martyrdom
+in the French," the "Membranous Croup" sketch, and many others which I
+need not specify): not doing this in order to make an advertisement of
+it, but because these things seemed instructive.
+
+HARTFORD, 1875.
+                                             MARK TWAIN.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+
+
+
+
+MY WATCH--[Written about 1870.]
+
+AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE
+
+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
+canebrake!  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 facet 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 bargains 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 beep 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
+humorists 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 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--(French version is deleted
+from this edition)--, 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
+on 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 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 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, partiular look,
+and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate,  'Well,' he says,
+'I don't see no pints 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 the 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.'  Any 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 Teller 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 pints 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
+     
+"--Il y avait, une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim Smiley:
+c'etait dans l'hiver de 49, peut-etre bien au printemps de 50, je ne me
+reappelle pas exactement.  Ce qui me fait croire que c'etait l'un ou
+l'autre, c'est que je me souviens que le grand bief n'etait pas acheve
+lorsqu'il arriva au camp pour la premiere fois, mais de toutes facons il
+etait l'homme le plus friand de paris qui se put voir, pariant sur tout
+ce qui se presentaat, quand il pouvait trouver un adversaire, et, quand
+n'en trouvait pas il passait du cote oppose.  Tout ce qui convenaiat
+l'autre lui convenait; pourvu qu'il eut un pari, Smiley etait satisfait.
+Et il avait une chance! une chance inouie:  presque toujours il gagnait.
+It faut dire qu'il etait toujours pret a'exposer, qu'on ne pouvait
+mentionner la moindre chose sans que ce gaillard offrit de parier la-
+dessus n'importe quoi et de prendre le cote que l'on voudrait, comme je
+vous le disais tout a l'heure.  S'il y avait des courses, vous le
+trouviez riche ou ruine a la fin; s'il y avait un combat de chiens, il
+apportait son enjeu; il l'apportait pour un combat de chats, pour un
+combat de coqs;--parbleu! si vous aviez vu deux oiseaux sur une haie il
+vous aurait offert de parier lequel s'envolerait le premier, et s'il y
+aviat 'meeting' au camp, il venait parier regulierement pour le cure
+Walker, qu'il jugeait etre le meilleur predicateur des environs, et qui
+l'etait en effet, et un brave homme.  Il aurai rencontre une punaise de
+bois en chemin, qu'il aurait parie sur le temps qu'il lui faudrait pour
+aller ou 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 cure Walker fut tres malade
+pendant longtemps, il semblait qu'on ne la sauverait pas; mai un matin le
+cure arrive, et Smiley lui demande comment ella va et il dit qu'elle est
+bien mieux, grace a l'infinie misericorde tellement mieux qu'avec la 
+benediction de la Providence elle s'en tirerait, et voila que, sans y
+penser, Smiley repond:--Eh bien! ye gage deux et demi qu'elle mourra tout
+de meme.
+
+"Ce Smiley avait une jument que les gars appelaient le bidet du quart
+d'heure, mais seulement pour plaisanter, vous comprenez, parse que, bien
+entendu, elle etait plus vite que ca!  Et il avait coutume de gagner de
+l'argent avec cette bete, quoi-qu'elle fut poussive, cornarde, toujours
+prise d'asthme, de colique ou de consomption, ou de quelque chose
+d'approchant. On lui donnait 2 ou 300 'yards' au depart, puffs on la
+depassait sans peine; mais jamais a la fin elle ne manquait de
+s'echauffer, de s'exasperer et elle arrivait, s'ecartant, se defendant,
+ses jambes greles en l'ai devant les obstacles, quelquefois les evitant
+et faisant avec cela plus de poussiare qu'aucun cheval, plus de bruit
+surtout avec ses eternumens et reniflemens.---crac! elle arrivaat donc
+toujour premiere d'une tete, aussi juste qu'on peut le mesurer.  Et il
+avait un petit bouledogue qui, a le voir, ne valait pas un sou; on aurait
+cru que parier contre lui c'etait voler, tant il etait ordinaire; mais
+aussitot les enjeux faits, il devenait un autre chien.  Sa machoire
+inferieure commencait a ressortir comme un gaillard d'avant, ses dents se
+decouvcraient brillantes commes des fournaises, et un chien pouvait le
+taquiner, l'exciter, le mordre, le jeter deux ou trois fois par-dessus
+son epaule, Andre Jackson, c'etait le nom du chien, Andre Jackson prenait
+cela tranquillement, comme s'il ne se fut jamais attendu a autre chose,
+et quand les paris etaient doubles et redoubles contre lui, il vous
+saisissait l'autre chien juste a l'articulation de la jambe de derriere,
+et il ne la lachait plus, non pas qu'il la machat, vous concevez, mais il
+s'y serait tenu pendu jusqu'a ce qu'on jetat l'eponge en l'air, fallut-il
+attendre un an.  Smiley gagnait toujours avec cette bete-la;
+malheureusement ils ont fini par dresser un chien qui n'avait pas de
+pattes de derriere, parce qu'on les avait sciees, et quand les choses
+furent au point qu'il voulait, et qu'il en vint a se jeter sur son
+morceau favori, le pauvre chien comprit en un instant qu'on s'etait moque
+de lui, et que l'autre le tenait.  Vous n'avez jamais vu personne avoir
+l'air plus penaud et plus decourage; il ne fit aucun effort pour gagner
+le combat et fut rudement secoue, de sorte que, regardant Smiley comme
+pour lui dire:--Mon coeur est brise, c'est to faute; pourquoi m'avoir
+livre a un chien qui n'a pas de pattes de derriere, puisque c'est par la
+que je les bats?--il s'en alla en clopinant, et se coucha pour mourir.
+Ah! c'etait un bon chien, cet Andre Jackson, et il se serait fait un nom,
+s'il avait vecu, car il y avait de l'etoffe en lui, il avait du genie,
+je la sais, bien que de grandes occasions lui aient manque; mais il est
+impossible de supposer qu'un chien capable de se battre comme lui,
+certaines circonstances etant donnees, ait manque de talent.  Je me sens
+triste toutes les fois que je pense a son dernier combat et au denoument
+qu'il a eu.  Eh bien! ce Smiley nourrissait des terriers a rats, et des
+coqs combat, et des chats, et toute sorte de choses, au point qu'il etait
+toujours en mesure de vous tenir tete, 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 pretendait faire son Education; vous me croirez si
+vous voulez, mais pendant trois mois il n'a rien fait que lui apprendre a
+sauter dans une cour retire de sa maison. Et je vous reponds qu'il avait
+reussi.  Il lui donnait un petit coup par derriere, et l'instant d'apres
+vous voyiez la grenouille tourner en l'air comme un beignet au-dessus de
+la poele, faire une culbute, quelquefois deux, lorsqu'elle etait bien
+partie, et retomber sur ses pattes comme un chat.  Il l'avait dressee
+dans l'art de gober des mouches, er l'y exercait continuellement, si bien
+qu'une mouche, du plus loin qu'elle apparaissait, etait une mouche
+perdue. Smiley avait coutume de dire que tout ce qui manquait a une
+grenouille, c'etait l'education, qu'avec l'education elle pouvait faire
+presque tout, et je le crois.  Tenez, je l'ai vu poser Daniel Webster la
+sur se plancher,--Daniel Webster etait 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 saute de
+nouveau par terre, ou il restait vraiment a se gratter la tete avec sa
+patte de derriere, comme s'il n'avait pas eu la moindre idee de sa
+superiorite.  Jamais vous n'avez grenouille vu de aussi modeste, aussi
+naturelle, douee comme elle l'etait!  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 espece que vous puissiez connaitre. Sauter
+a plat, c'etait son fort! Quand il s'agissait de cela, Smiley en tassait
+les enjeux sur elle tant qu'il lui, restait un rouge liard. Il faut le
+reconnaitre, Smiley etait monstrueusement fier de sa grenouille, et il en
+avait le droit, car des gens qui avaient voyage, qui avaient tout vu,
+disaient qu'on lui ferait injure de la comparer a une autre; de facon que
+Smiley gardait Daniel dans une petite boite a claire-voie qu'il emportait
+parfois a la Ville pour quelque pari.
+
+"Un jour, un individu etranger au camp l'arrete aver sa boite et lui
+dit:--Qu'est-ce que vous avez donc serre la dedans?
+
+"Smiley dit d'un air indifferent:--Cela pourrait etre 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 cote et de
+l'autre puis il dit.--Tiens! en effet!  A quoi estelle bonne?
+
+"--Mon Dieu! repond Smiley, toujours d'un air degage, elle est bonne pour
+une chose a mon avis, elle peut battre en sautant toute grenouille du
+comte de Calaveras.
+
+"L'individu reprend la boite, l'examine de nouveau longuement, et la rend
+a Smiley en disant d'un air delibere:--Eh bien! je ne vois pas que cette
+grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune grenouille.
+
+"--Possible qua vous ne le voyiez pat, dit Smiley, possible que vous vous
+entendiez en grenouilles, possible que vous ne vous y entendez point,
+possible qua vous avez de l'experience, et possible que vous ne soyez
+qu'un amateur.  De toute maniere, je parie quarante dollars qu'elle
+battra en sautant n'importe quelle grenouille du comte de Calaveras.
+
+"L'individu reflechit one seconde et dit comma attriste:--Je ne suis
+qu'un etranger ici, je n'ai pas de grenouille; mais, si j'en
+avais une, je tiendrais le pari.
+
+"--Fort bien! repond Smiley.  Rien de plus facile. Si vous voulez tenir
+ma boite one minute, j'irai vous chercher une grenouille.--Voile donc
+l'individu qui garde la boite, qui met ses quarante dollars sur ceux de
+Smiley et qui attend.  Il attend assez longtemps, reflechissant tout
+seul, et figurez-vous qu'il prend Daniel, lui ouvre la bouche de force at
+avec une cuiller a the l'emplit de menu plomb de chasse, mail l'emplit
+jusqu'au menton, puis il le pose par terre.  Smiley pendant ce temps
+etait a barboter dans une mare.  Finalement il attrape une grenouille,
+l'apporte cet individu et dit:--Maintenant, si vous etes pret, mettez-la
+tout contra Daniel, avec leurs pattes de devant sur la meme ligne, et je
+donnerai le signal; puis il ajoute:--Un, deux, trois, sautez!
+
+"Lui et l'individu touchent leurs grenouilles par derriere, et la
+grenouille neuve se met h sautiller, mais Daniel se souleve lourdement,
+hausse les epaules ainsi, comma un Francais; a quoi bon? il ne pouvait
+bouger, il etait plante solide comma une enclume, il n'avancait pas plus
+que si on l'eut mis a l'ancre. Smiley fut surpris et degoute, 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'epaule, comma ca, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air
+delibere:--Eh bien! je ne vois pas qua cette grenouille ait rien de muiex
+qu'une autre.
+
+"Smiley se gratta longtemps la tete, les yeux fixes Sur Daniel; jusqu'a
+ce qu'enfin il dit:--je me demande comment diable il se fait qua cette
+bite ait refuse, . . . Est-ce qu'elle aurait quelque chose? . . . On
+croirait qu'elle est enflee.
+
+"Il empoigne Daniel par la peau du coo, le souleve et dit:--Le loup me
+croque, s'il ne pese pas cinq livres.
+
+"Il le retourne, et le malheureux crache deux poignees de plomb.  Quand
+Smiley reconnut ce qui en etait, il fut comme fou.  Vous le voyez d'ici
+poser sa grenouille par terra et courir apres 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 a l'heure).  If it there was of races, you him find
+rich or ruined at the end; if it, here 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 cure Walker, which he judged to be the best predicator of the
+neighborhood (predicateur des environs) and which he was in effect, and a
+brave man.  He would encounter a bug of wood in the road, whom he will
+bet upon the time which he shall take to go where she would go--and if
+you him have take at the word, he will follow the bug as far as Mexique,
+without 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, grace a l'infinie misericorde) 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 echauffer,
+of herself exasperate, and she arrives herself ecartant, se defendant,
+her legs greles in the air before the obstacles, sometimes them elevating
+and making with this more of dust than any horse, more of noise above
+with his eternumens and reniflemens--crac! she arrives then always first
+by one head, as just as one can it measure.  And he had a small 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, Andre Jackson--this was the name of the dog--Andre Jackson
+takes that tranquilly, as if he not himself was never expecting other
+thing, and when the bets were doubled and redoubled against him, he you
+seize the other dog just at the articulation of the leg of behind, and he
+not it leave more, not that he it 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-la;
+unhappily they have finished by elevating a dog who no had not of feet of
+behind, because one them had sawed; and when things were at the point
+that he would, and that he came to himself throw upon his morsel
+favorite, the poor dog comprehended in an instant that he himself was
+deceived in him, and that the other dog him had.  You no have never 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 a rats, and some cocks of
+combat, and some pats, and all sorts of things; and with his rage of
+betting one no had more of repose.  He trapped one day a frog and him
+imported with him (et l'emporta chez lui) saying that he pretended to
+make his education.  You me believe if you will, but during three months
+he not has nothing done but to him apprehend to jump (apprendre a sauter)
+in a court retired of her mansion (de sa maison).  And I you respond that
+he have 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 fifes!"--in a flash of the eye Daniel 30
+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 (A mon avis), she can better in jumping (elle pent
+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 maniere) I bet forty dollars that
+she better 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 d pouce par-dessus l'epaule, comme ga, au
+pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air delibere):
+
+"Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothin 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
+pints 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 Dallyhack 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, down-
+stairs.  He advertises--we take it out in trade."
+
+He was gone.  I shuddered.  At the end of the next three hours I had been
+through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were
+gone from me.  Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window.
+Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took
+the job off my hands.  In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill
+of fare, I had lost my scalp.  Another stranger, by the name of Thompson,
+left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags.  And at last, at bay in
+the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs,
+politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their
+weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of
+steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief
+arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends.  Then
+ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one
+either, could describe.  People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up,
+thrown out of the window.  There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy,
+with a confused and frantic war-dance 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 stovepipe 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 boy deserved to be exalted, and then tell him 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--[Witten 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
+gold little boys they put in the Sunday-school book; 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 so 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 lithe 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-boo 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 hackful of small
+reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's
+unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages
+after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood-relations, the
+other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust.
+
+There is no actual harm in making Niagara a 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.  Nova 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 takon' 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!"  "Bang 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 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 by 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 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 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, stirnn'
+     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 a twidle his thumbs because there didn't
+     happen to be nothin' do 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" (calkatin' 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
+butter milk 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 cove-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 earned
+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
+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 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, they 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,
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 a 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 be come 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
+
+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 dears!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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's here,
+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 resume can be amply proved by the official
+records of the General Government.
+
+John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey,
+deceased, contracted with the General Government, on or about the 10th
+day of October, 1861, to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of
+thirty barrels of beef.
+
+Very well.
+
+He started after Sherman with the beef, but when he got to Washington
+Sherman had gone to 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 W.
+Bartholomew W.  made out the following bill, and then died:
+
+     THE UNITED STATES
+
+               In account with JOHN WILSON MACKENZIE, of New Jersey,
+               deceased, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .          Dr.
+
+     To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100, $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 l0th 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 hi presence--kindly, but
+firmly.  The next day 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 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 this 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, $110,004.89 for the indigent Fishers.  So now we have: First,
+$8,873 damages; second, interest on it from 1832 to 1848, $8997.94;
+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 silent 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 in 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 then 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 we: 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 paper; 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.
+                                                             DOL.C
+1813.--To 550 head of cattle, at 10 dollars, ............. 5,500.00
+       To 86 head of drove hogs, ......................... 1,204.00
+       To 350 head of stock hogs, ........................ 1,750.00
+       To 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT'S CREEK, .......... 6,000.00
+       To 8 barrels of whisky, ...........................   350.00
+       To 2 barrels of brandy, ...........................   280.00
+       To 1 barrel of rum, ...............................    70.00
+       To dry-goods and merchandise in store, ............ 1,100.00
+       To 35 acres of wheat, .............................   350.00
+       To 2,000 hides, ................................... 4,000.00
+       To furs and hats in store, ........................   600.00
+       To crockery ware in store, ........................   100.00
+       To smith's and carpenter's tools, .................   250.00
+       To houses burned and destroyed, ...................   600.00
+       To 4 dozen bottles of wine, .......................    48.00
+1814.--To 120 acres of corn on Alabama River, ............ 9,500.00
+       To crops of peas, fodder, etc. .................... 3,250.00
+
+                         Total, ..........................34,952.00
+
+       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 along
+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 damp 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 earned 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
+stewed 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 thereby
+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, 6 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 tooth-
+mark 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 soil
+--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 let 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
+creation 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 exceedings 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 Mat 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 I 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
+as 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.
+
+     "'Messes. 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 Jaw
+     bone 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 bash, 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
+
+
+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, huzzy!  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.  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 tie 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 strange 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' 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 save 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 self-same 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 Phenix'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 while 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 eclat, 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 mate, 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
+
+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-grand mother
+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 fiend 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 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.  It 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 lov an' kind to me, jist as kind as you is to yo' own
+wife.  An' we had chil'en--seven chil'en--an' 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 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 tetch 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, de 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 indisposition,
+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.]
+
+On 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, anal 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 is 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 wait 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 bees 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 is 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 center has
+extended to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple band of
+brothers working sweetly hand in hand--the Colt's Arms Company making the
+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 may 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 abort 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 hard 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 eclat, 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 pint 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 along
+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 Jose; 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
+infect 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 Jerkins may
+get an idea therefrom:
+
+Mrs. W. M. was attired in an elegant 'pate 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 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 far 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 ruin 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 expansive for me!"
+
+I think the seditious disposition, restrained by the economical instinct,
+is finely put in that.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION
+
+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 alight (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 confreres 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 pious and correct wishes.  When I was seven years of
+age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total
+abstinence; and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my
+mother.'
+
+I never saw anything so curious.  It is almost an exact epitome of my own
+moral career--after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother.  How
+well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco, good old
+soul!  She said, "You're at it again, are you, you whelp?  Now don't ever
+let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay I'll
+blacksnake you within an inch of your life!"  I have never touched it at
+that hour of the morning from that time to the present day.
+
+She asked me not to gamble.  She whispered and said, "Put up those wicked
+cards this minute!--two pair and a jack, you numskull, and the other
+fellow's got a flush!"
+
+I never have gambled from that day to this--never once--without a "cold
+deck" in my pocket.  I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games
+that are being played unless I deal myself.
+
+When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a
+resolution of total abstinence.  That I have adhered to it and enjoyed
+the beneficent effects of it through all time, I owe to my grandmother.
+I have never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HONORED AS A CURIOSITY
+
+If you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu, and experience
+that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by
+finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and
+address him as "Captain."  Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his
+countenance that you are on the wrong track, ask him where he preaches.
+It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler.
+I became personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six
+missionaries.  The captains and ministers form one-half of the
+population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile
+foreigners and their families; and the final fourth is made up of high
+officers of the Hawaiian Government.  And there are just about cats
+enough for three apiece all around.
+
+A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs one day, and said:
+
+"Good morning, your reverence.  Preach in the stone church yonder, no
+doubt!"
+
+"No, I don't.  I'm not a preacher."
+
+"Really, I beg your pardon, captain.  I trust you had a good season.  How
+much oil--"
+
+"Oil!  Why, what do you take me for?  I'm not a whaler."
+
+"Oh!  I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency.  Major-General in the
+household troops, no doubt?  Minister of the Interior, likely?  Secretary
+of War?  First Gentleman of the Bedchamber?  Commissioner of the Royal--"
+
+"Stuff, man!  I'm not connected in any way with the government."
+
+"Bless my life!  Then who the mischief are you? what the mischief are
+you? and how the mischief did you get here? and where in thunder did you
+come from?"
+
+"I'm only a private personage--an unassuming stranger--lately arrived
+from America."
+
+" No!  Not a missionary! not a whaler! not a member of his Majesty's
+government! not even a Secretary of the Navy!  Ah!  Heaven! it is too
+blissful to be true, alas! I do but dream.  And yet that noble, honest
+countenance--those oblique, ingenuous eyes--that massive head, incapable
+of--of anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif.  Excuse these
+tears.  For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this,
+and--"
+
+Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away.  I pitied
+this poor creature from the bottom of my heart.  I was deeply moved.
+I shed a few tears on him, and kissed him for his mother.  I then took
+what small change he had, and "shoved."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD--[Written about 1870.]
+
+I had never seen him before.  He brought letters of introduction from
+mutual friends in San Francisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with
+him.  It was almost religion, there in the silver-mines, to precede such
+a meal with whisky cocktails.  Artemus, with the true cosmopolitan
+instinct, always deferred to the customs of the country he was in, and so
+he ordered three of those abominations.  Hingston was present.  I said I
+would rather not drink a whisky cocktail.  I said it would go right to my
+head, and confuse me so that I would be in a helpless tangle in ten
+minutes.  I did not want to act like a lunatic before strangers.  But
+Artemus gently insisted, and I drank the treasonable mixture under
+protest, and felt all the time that I was doing a thing I might be sorry
+for.  In a minute or two I began to imagine that my ideas were clouded.
+I waited in great anxiety for the conversation to open, with a sort of
+vague hope that my understanding would prove clear, after all, and my
+misgivings groundless.
+
+Artemus dropped an unimportant remark or two, and then assumed a look of
+superhuman earnestness, and made the following astounding speech.  He
+said:
+
+"Now there is one thing I ought to ask you about before I forget it.  You
+have been here in Silver land--here in Nevada--two or three years, and,
+of course, your position on the daily press has made it necessary for you
+to go down in the mines and examine them carefully in detail, and
+therefore you know all about the silver-mining business.  Now what I want
+to get at is--is, well, the way the deposits of ore are made, you know.
+For instance.  Now, as I understand it, the vein which contains the
+silver is sandwiched in between casings of granite, and runs along the
+ground, and sticks up like a curb stone.  Well, take a vein forty feet
+thick, for example, or eighty, for that matter, or even a hundred--say
+you go down on it with a shaft, straight down, you know, or with what you
+call 'incline' maybe you go down five hundred feet, or maybe you don't go
+down but two hundred--anyway, you go down, and all the time this vein
+grows narrower, when the casings come nearer or approach each other, you
+may say--that is, when they do approach, which, of course, they do not
+always do, particularly in cases where the nature of the formation is
+such that they stand apart wider than they otherwise would, and which
+geology has failed to account for, although everything in that science
+goes to prove that, all things being equal, it would if it did not, or
+would not certainly if it did, and then, of course, they are.  Do not you
+think it is?"
+
+I said to myself:
+
+"Now I just knew how it would be--that whisky cocktail has done the
+business for me; I don't understand any more than a clam."
+
+And then I said aloud:
+
+"I--I--that is--if you don't mind, would you--would you say that over
+again?  I ought--"
+
+"Oh, certainly, certainly!  You see I am very unfamiliar with the
+subject, and perhaps I don't present my case clearly, but I--"
+
+"No, no-no, no-you state it plain enough, but that cocktail has muddled
+me a little.  But I will no, I do understand for that matter; but I would
+get the hang of it all the better if you went over it again-and I'll pay
+better attention this time."
+
+He said; "Why, what I was after was this."
+
+[Here he became even more fearfully impressive than ever, and emphasized
+each particular point by checking it off on his finger-ends.]
+
+"This vein, or lode, or ledge, or whatever you call it, runs along
+between two layers of granite, just the same as if it were a sandwich.
+Very well.  Now suppose you go down on that, say a thousand feet, or
+maybe twelve hundred (it don't really matter) before you drift, and then
+you start your drifts, some of them across the ledge, and others along
+the length of it, where the sulphurets--I believe they call them
+sulphurets, though why they should, considering that, so far as I can
+see, the main dependence of a miner does not so lie, as some suppose, but
+in which it cannot be successfully maintained, wherein the same should
+not continue, while part and parcel of the same ore not committed to
+either in the sense referred to, whereas, under different circumstances,
+the most inexperienced among us could not detect it if it were, or might
+overlook it if it did, or scorn the very idea of such a thing, even
+though it were palpably demonstrated as such.  Am I not right?"
+
+I said, sorrowfully: "I feel ashamed of myself, Mr.  Ward.  I know I
+ought to understand you perfectly well, but you see that treacherous
+whisky cocktail has got into my head, and now I cannot understand even
+the simplest proposition.  I told you how it would be."
+
+"Oh, don't mind it, don't mind it; the fault was my own, no doubt--though
+I did think it clear enough for--"
+
+"Don't say a word.  Clear!  Why, you stated it as clear as the sun to
+anybody but an abject idiot; but it's that confounded cocktail that has
+played the mischief."
+
+"No; now don't say that.  I'll begin it all over again, and--"
+
+"Don't now--for goodness' sake, don't do anything of the kind, because I
+tell you my head is in such a condition that I don't believe I could
+understand the most trifling question a man could ask me.
+
+"Now don't you be afraid.  I'll put it so plain this time that you can't
+help but get the hang of it.  We will begin at the very beginning."
+[Leaning far across the table, with determined impressiveness wrought
+upon his every feature, and fingers prepared to keep tally of each point
+enumerated; and I, leaning forward with painful interest, resolved to
+comprehend or perish.]  "You know the vein, the ledge, the thing that
+contains the metal, whereby it constitutes the medium between all other
+forces, whether of present or remote agencies, so brought to bear in
+favor of the former against the latter, or the latter against the former
+or all, or both, or compromising the relative differences existing within
+the radius whence culminate the several degrees of similarity to which--"
+
+I said: "Oh, hang my wooden head, it ain't any use!--it ain't any use to
+try--I can't understand anything.  The plainer you get it the more I
+can't get the hang of it."
+
+I heard a suspicious noise behind me, and turned in time to see Hingston
+dodging behind a newspaper, and quaking with a gentle ecstasy of
+laughter.  I looked at Ward again, and he had thrown off his dread
+solemnity and was laughing also.  Then I saw that I had been sold--that I
+had been made a victim of a swindle in the way of a string of plausibly
+worded sentences that didn't mean anything under the sun.  Artemus Ward
+was one of the best fellows in the world, and one of the most
+companionable.  It has been said that he was not fluent in conversation,
+but, with the above experience in my mind, I differ.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS--[Written abort 1867.]
+
+I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way West, after changing cars at
+Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about
+forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat
+down beside me.  We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an
+hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining.
+When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask
+questions about various public men, and about Congressional affairs; and
+I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly
+familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capital, even to
+the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and
+Representatives in the Chambers of the national Legislature.  Presently
+two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other:
+
+"Harris, if you'll do that for me, I'll never forget you, my boy."
+
+My new comrade's eye lighted pleasantly.  The words had touched upon a
+happy memory, I thought.  Then his face settled into thoughtfulness--
+almost into gloom.  He turned to me and said,
+
+"Let me tell you a story; let me give you a secret chapter of my life--
+a chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events
+transpired.  Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt
+me."
+
+I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure,
+speaking sometimes with animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always
+with feeling and earnestness.
+
+
+                         THE STRANGER'S NARRATIVE
+
+"On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening
+train bound for Chicago.  There were only twenty-four passengers, all
+told.  There were no ladies and no children.  We were in excellent
+spirits, and pleasant acquaintanceships were soon formed.  The journey
+bade fair to be a happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had
+even the vaguest presentiment of the horrors we were soon to undergo.
+
+"At 11 P.m.  it began to snow hard.  Shortly after leaving the small
+village of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that
+stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward
+the jubilee Settlements.  The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills, or
+even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving
+the falling snow before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy
+sea.  The snow was deepening fast; and we knew, by the diminished speed
+of the train, that the engine was plowing through it with steadily
+increasing difficulty.  Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes,
+in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves
+across the track.  Conversation began to flag.  Cheerfulness gave place
+to grave concern.  The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on
+the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every
+mind, and extended its depressing influence over every spirit.
+
+"At two o'clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by
+the ceasing of all motion about me.  The appalling truth flashed upon me
+instantly--we were captives in a snow-drift!  'All hands to the rescue!'
+Every man sprang to obey.  Out into the wild night, the pitchy darkness,
+the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the
+consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all.
+Shovels, hands, boards--anything, everything that could displace snow,
+was brought into instant requisition.  It was a weird picture, that small
+company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the blackest
+shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotive's reflector.
+
+"One short hour sufficed to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts.
+The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away.
+And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand charge the
+engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the
+driving-wheel!  With a free track before us we should still have been
+helpless.  We entered the car wearied with labor, and very sorrowful.
+We gathered about the stoves, and gravely canvassed our situation.  We
+had no provisions whatever--in this lay our chief distress.  We could not
+freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender.  This was our
+only comfort.  The discussion ended at last in accepting the
+disheartening decision of the conductor, viz., that it would be death for
+any man to attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that.
+We could not send for help, and even if we could it would not come.  We
+must submit, and await, as patiently as we might, succor or starvation!
+I think the stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words
+were uttered.
+
+"Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there
+about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the
+blast; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled
+themselves among the flickering shadows to think--to forget the present,
+if they could--to sleep, if they might.
+
+"The eternal night-it surely seemed eternal to us-wore its lagging hours
+away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east.  As the light
+grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of life, one
+after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from his
+forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out of the windows
+upon the cheerless prospect.  It was cheer less, indeed!-not a living
+thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a vast white
+desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the
+wind--a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above.
+
+"All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much.  Another
+lingering dreary night--and hunger.
+
+"Another dawning--another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger,
+hopeless watching for succor that could not come.  A night of restless
+slumber, filled with dreams of feasting--wakings distressed with the
+gnawings of hunger.
+
+"The fourth day came and went--and the fifth!  Five days of dreadful
+imprisonment!  A savage hunger looked out at every eye.  There was in it
+a sign of awful import--the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely
+shaping itself in every heart--a something which no tongue dared yet to
+frame into words.
+
+"The sixth day passed--the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and
+hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death.  It must
+out now!  That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready
+to leap from every lip at last!  Nature had been taxed to the utmost--she
+must yield.  RICHARD H. GASTON of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous, and pale,
+rose up.  All knew what was coming.  All prepared--every emotion, every
+semblance of excitement--was smothered--only a calm, thoughtful
+seriousness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild.
+
+"'Gentlemen: It cannot be delayed longer!  The time is at hand!  We must
+determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest!'
+
+"MR. JOHN J. WILLIAMS of Illinois rose and said: 'Gentlemen--I nominate
+the Rev. James Sawyer of Tennessee.'
+
+"MR. Wm. R. ADAMS of Indiana said: 'I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote of New
+York.'
+
+"MR. CHARLES J. LANGDON: 'I nominate Mr. Samuel A.  Bowen of St. Louis.'
+
+"MR. SLOTE: 'Gentlemen--I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A. Van
+Nostrand, Jun., of New Jersey.'
+
+"MR. GASTON: 'If there be no objection, the gentleman's desire will be
+acceded to.'
+
+"MR. VAN NOSTRAND objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected.
+The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and
+refused upon the same grounds.
+
+"MR. A. L. BASCOM of Ohio: 'I move that the nominations now close, and
+that the House proceed to an election by ballot.'
+
+"MR. SAWYER: 'Gentlemen--I protest earnestly against these proceedings.
+They are, in every way, irregular and unbecoming.  I must beg to move
+that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the meeting
+and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the
+business before us understandingly.'
+
+"MR. BELL of Iowa: 'Gentlemen--I object.  This is no time to stand upon
+forms and ceremonious observances.  For more than seven days we have been
+without food.  Every moment we lose in idle discussion increases our
+distress.  I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made--every
+gentleman present is, I believe--and I, for one, do not see why we should
+not proceed at once to elect one or more of them.  I wish to offer a
+resolution--'
+
+"MR. GASTON: 'It would be objected to, and have to lie over one day under
+the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid.  The
+gentleman from New Jersey--'
+
+"MR. VAN NOSTRAND: 'Gentlemen--I am a stranger among you; I have not
+sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a
+delicacy--'
+
+"MR. MORGAN Of Alabama (interrupting): 'I move the previous question.'
+
+"The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course.  The
+motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen
+chairman, Mr. Blake, secretary, Messrs.  Holcomb, Dyer, and Baldwin a
+committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the
+committee in making selections.
+
+"A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucusing
+followed.  At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the
+committee reported in favor of Messrs. George Ferguson of Kentucky,
+Lucien Herrman of Louisiana, and W. Messick of Colorado as candidates.
+The report was accepted.
+
+"MR. ROGERS of Missouri: 'Mr. President The report being properly before
+the House now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of Mr.
+Herrman that of Mr. Lucius Harris of St.  Louis, who is well and
+honorably known to us all.  I do not wish to be understood as casting the
+least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentleman
+from Louisiana far from it.  I respect and esteem him as much as any
+gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us can be blind to the
+fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here
+than any among us--none of us can be blind to the fact that the committee
+has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or a graver
+fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however pure
+his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him--'
+
+"THE CHAIR: 'The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat.  The Chair
+cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned save by the
+regular course, under the rules.  What action will the House take upon
+the gentleman's motion?'
+
+"MR. HALLIDAY of Virginia: 'I move to further amend the report by
+substituting Mr. Harvey Davis of Oregon for Mr. Messick.  It may be urged
+by gentlemen that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have
+rendered Mr.  Davis tough; but, gentlemen, is this a time to cavil at
+toughness?  Is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles?  Is this
+a time to dispute about matters of paltry significance?  No, gentlemen,
+bulk is what we desire--substance, weight, bulk--these are the supreme
+requisites now--not talent, not genius, not education.  I insist upon my
+motion.'
+
+"MR. MORGAN (excitedly): 'Mr.  Chairman--I do most strenuously object to
+this amendment.  The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is
+bulky only in bone--not in flesh.  I ask the gentleman from Virginia if
+it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance? if he would delude us
+with shadows?  if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonian specter?
+I ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can
+gaze into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant
+hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us?  I ask him
+if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark
+future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this
+tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from
+Oregon's hospitable shores?  Never!' [Applause.]
+
+"The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery debate, and lost.  Mr.
+Harris was substituted on the first amendment.  The balloting then began.
+Five ballots were held without a choice.  On the sixth, Mr.  Harris was
+elected, all voting for him but himself.  It was then moved that his
+election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in
+consequence of his again voting against himself.
+
+"MR. RADWAY moved that the House now take up the remaining candidates,
+and go into an election for breakfast.  This was carried.
+
+"On the first ballot--there was a tie, half the members favoring one
+candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account
+of his superior size.  The President gave the casting vote for the
+latter, Mr. Messick.  This decision created considerable dissatisfaction
+among the friends of Mr. Ferguson, the defeated candidate, and there was
+some talk of demanding a new ballot; but in the midst of it a motion to
+adjourn was carried, and the meeting broke up at once.
+
+"The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson
+faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then,
+when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr.
+Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds.
+
+"We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car-seats, and sat down
+with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our
+vision for seven torturing days.  How changed we were from what we had
+been a few short hours before!  Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger,
+feverish anxiety, desperation, then; thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep
+for utterance now.  That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful
+life.  The winds howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison house,
+but they were powerless to distress us any more.  I liked Harris.  He
+might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man
+ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree
+of satisfaction.  Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored,
+but for genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fiber, give me Harris.
+Messick had his good points--I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish
+to do it but he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be,
+sir--not a bit.  Lean?--why, bless me!--and tough?  Ah, he was very
+tough!  You could not imagine it--you could never imagine anything like
+it."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that--"
+
+"Do not interrupt me, please.  After breakfast we elected a man by the
+name of Walker, from Detroit, for supper.  He was very good.  I wrote his
+wife so afterward.  He was worthy of all praise.  I shall always remember
+Walker.  He was a little rare, but very good.  And then the next morning
+we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I
+ever sat down to handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages
+fluently a perfect gentleman he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly
+juicy.  For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud,
+there is no question about it--old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture
+the reality.  I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I
+will wait for another election.  And Grimes of Illinois said, 'Gentlemen,
+I will wait also.  When you elect a man that has something to recommend
+him, I shall be glad to join you again.'  It soon became evident that
+there was general dissatisfaction with Davis of Oregon, and so, to
+preserve the good will that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had
+Harris, an election was called, and the result of it was that Baker of
+Georgia was chosen.  He was splendid!  Well, well--after that we had
+Doolittle, and Hawkins, and McElroy (there was some complaint about
+McElroy, because he was uncommonly short and thin), and Penrod, and two
+Smiths, and Bailey (Bailey had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he
+was otherwise good), and an Indian boy, and an organ-grinder, and a
+gentleman by the name of Buckminster--a poor stick of a vagabond that
+wasn't any good for company and no account for breakfast.  We were glad
+we got him elected before relief came."
+
+"And so the blessed relief did come at last?"
+
+"Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election.  John
+Murphy was the choice, and there never was a better, I am willing to
+testify; but John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to
+succor us, and lived to marry the widow Harris--"
+
+"Relict of--"
+
+"Relict of our first choice.  He married her, and is happy and respected
+and prosperous yet.  Ah, it was like a novel, sir--it was like a romance.
+This is my stopping-place, sir; I must bid you goodby.  Any time that you
+can make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be glad to
+have you.  I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you.
+I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir.  Good day, sir,
+and a pleasant journey."
+
+He was gone.  I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my
+life.  But in my soul I was glad he was gone.  With all his gentleness of
+manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye
+upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and
+that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly
+stood still!
+
+I was bewildered beyond description.  I did not doubt his word; I could
+not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness
+of truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my
+thoughts into hopeless confusion.  I saw the conductor looking at me.
+I said, "Who is that man?"
+
+"He was a member of Congress once, and a good one.  But he got caught in
+a snow-drift in the cars, and like to have been starved to death.  He got
+so frost-bitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of
+something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three
+months afterward.  He is all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when
+he gets on that old subject he never stops till he has eat up that whole
+car-load of people he talks about.  He would have finished the crowd by
+this time, only he had to get out here.  He has got their names as pat as
+A B C.  When he gets them all eat up but himself, he always says: 'Then
+the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived; and there
+being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no
+objections offered, I resigned.  Thus I am here.'"
+
+I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to
+the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a
+bloodthirsty cannibal.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"--[Written about 1865.]
+
+Being the only true and reliable account ever published; taken from the
+Roman "Daily Evening Fasces," of the date of that tremendous occurrence.
+
+Nothing in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfaction as
+gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder and writing
+them up with aggravating circumstantiality.  He takes a living delight in
+this labor of love--for such it is to him, especially if he knows that
+all the other papers have gone to press, and his will be the only one
+that will contain the dreadful intelligence.  A feeling of regret has
+often come over me that I was not reporting in Rome when Caesar was
+killed--reporting on an evening paper, and the only one in the city, and
+getting at least twelve hours ahead of the morning-paper boys with this
+most magnificent "item" that ever fell to the lot of the craft.  Other
+events have happened as startling as this, but none that possessed so
+peculiarly all the characteristics of the favorite "item" of the present
+day, magnified into grandeur and sublimity by the high rank, fame, and
+social and political standing of the actors in it.
+
+However, as I was not permitted to report Caesar's assassination in the
+regular way, it has at least afforded me rare satisfaction to translate
+the following able account of it from the original Latin of the Roman
+Daily Evening Fasces of that date--second edition:
+
+
+Our usually quiet city of Rome was thrown into a state of wild excitement
+yesterday by the occurrence of one of those bloody affrays which sicken
+the heart and fill the soul with fear, while they inspire all thinking
+men with forebodings for the future of a city where human life is held so
+cheaply and the gravest laws are so openly set at defiance.  As the
+result of that affray, it is our painful duty, as public journalists, to
+record the death of one of our most esteemed citizens--a man whose name
+is known wherever this paper circulates, and where fame it has been our
+pleasure and our privilege to extend, and also to protect from the tongue
+of slander and falsehood, to the best of our poor ability.  We refer to
+Mr. J. Caesar, the Emperor-elect.
+
+The facts of the case, as nearly as our reporter could determine them
+from the conflicting statements of eye-witnesses, were about as follows:-
+The affair was an election row, of course.  Nine-tenths of the ghastly
+butcheries that disgrace the city nowadays grow out of the bickerings and
+jealousies and animosities engendered by these accursed elections.  Rome
+would be the gainer by it if her very constables were elected to serve a
+century; for in our experience we have never even been able to choose a
+dog-pelter without celebrating the event with a dozen knockdowns and a
+general cramming of the station-house with drunken vagabonds overnight.
+It is said that when the immense majority for Caesar at the polls in the
+market was declared the other day, and the crown was offered to that
+gentleman, even his amazing unselfishness in refusing it three times was
+not sufficient to save him from the whispered insults of such men as
+Casca, of the Tenth Ward, and other hirelings of the disappointed
+candidate, hailing mostly from the Eleventh and Thirteenth and other
+outside districts, who were overheard speaking ironically and
+contemptuously of Mr. Caesar's conduct upon that occasion.
+
+We are further informed that there are many among us who think they are
+justified in believing that the assassination of Julius Caesar was a put-
+up thing--a cut-and-dried arrangement, hatched by Marcus Brutus and a lot
+of his hired roughs, and carried out only too faithfully according to the
+program.  Whether there be good grounds for this suspicion or not, we
+leave to the people to judge for themselves, only asking that they will
+read the following account of the sad occurrence carefully and
+dispassionately before they render that judgment.
+
+The Senate was already in session, and Caesar was coming down the street
+toward the capitol, conversing with some personal friends, and followed,
+as usual, by a large number of citizens.  Just as he was passing in front
+of Demosthenes and Thucydides' drug store, he was observing casually to a
+gentleman, who, our informant thinks, is a fortune-teller, that the Ides
+of March were come.  The reply was, "Yes, they are come, but not gone
+yet."  At this moment Artemidorus stepped up and passed the time of day,
+and asked Caesar to read a schedule or a tract or something of the kind,
+which he had brought for his perusal.  Mr. Decius Brutus also said
+something about an "humble suit" which he wanted read.  Artexnidorus
+begged that attention might be paid to his first, because it was of
+personal consequence to Caesar.  The latter replied that what concerned
+himself should be read last, or words to that effect.  Artemidorus begged
+and beseeched him to read the paper instantly!--[Mark that: It is hinted
+by William Shakespeare, who saw the beginning and the end of the
+unfortunate affray, that this "schedule" was simply a note discovering to
+Caesar that a plot was brewing to take his life.]--However, Caesar
+shook him off, and refused to read any petition in the street.  He then
+entered the capitol, and the crowd followed him.
+
+About this time the following conversation was overheard, and we consider
+that, taken in connection with the events which succeeded it, it bears an
+appalling significance:  Mr. Papilius Lena remarked to George W. Cassias
+(commonly known as the "Nobby Boy of the Third Ward"), a bruiser in the
+pay of the Opposition, that he hoped his enterprise to-day might thrive;
+and when Cassias asked "What enterprise?" he only closed his left eye
+temporarily and said with simulated indifference, "Fare you well," and
+sauntered toward Caesar.  Marcus Brutus, who is suspected of being the
+ringleader of the band that killed Caesar, asked what it was that Lena
+had said.  Cassias told him, and added in a low tone, "I fear our purpose
+is discovered."
+
+Brutus told his wretched accomplice to keep an eye on Lena, and a moment
+after Cassias urged that lean and hungry vagrant, Casca, whose reputation
+here is none of the best, to be sudden, for he feared prevention.  He
+then turned to Brutus, apparently much excited, and asked what should be
+done, and swore that either he or Caesar would never turn back--he would
+kill himself first.  At this time Caesar was talking to some of the back-
+country members about the approaching fall elections, and paying little
+attention to what was going on around him.  Billy Trebonius got into
+conversation with the people's friend and Caesar's--Mark Antony--and
+under some pretense or other got him away, and Brutus, Decius, Casca,
+Cinna, Metellus Cimber, and others of the gang of infamous desperadoes
+that infest Rome at present, closed around the doomed Caesar.  Then
+Metellus Cimber knelt down and begged that his brother might be recalled
+from banishment, but Caesar rebuked him for his fawning conduct, and
+refused to grant his petition.  Immediately, at Cimber's request, first
+Brutus and then Cassias begged for the return of the banished Publius;
+but Caesar still refused.  He said he could not be moved; that he was as
+fixed as the North Star, and proceeded to speak in the most complimentary
+terms of the firmness of that star and its steady character.  Then he
+said he was like it, and he believed he was the only man in the country
+that was; therefore, since he was "constant" that Cimber should be
+banished, he was also "constant" that he should stay banished, and he'd
+be hanged if he didn't keep him so!
+
+Instantly seizing upon this shallow pretext for a fight, Casca sprang at
+Caesar and struck him with a dirk, Caesar grabbing him by the arm with
+his right hand, and launching a blow straight from the shoulder with his
+left, that sent the reptile bleeding to the earth.  He then backed up
+against Pompey's statue, and squared himself to receive his assailants.
+Cassias and Cimber and Cinna rushed, upon him with their daggers drawn,
+and the former succeeded in inflicting a wound upon his body; but before
+he could strike again, and before either of the others could strike at
+all, Caesar stretched the three miscreants at his feet with as many blows
+of his powerful fist.  By this time the Senate was in an indescribable
+uproar; the throng of citizens is the lobbies had blockaded the doors in
+their frantic efforts to escape from the building, the sergeant-at-arms
+and his assistants were struggling with the assassins, venerable senators
+had cast aside their encumbering robes, and were leaping over benches and
+flying down the aisles in wild confusion toward the shelter of the
+committee-rooms, and a thousand voices were shouting "Po-lice!  Po-lice!"
+in discordant tones that rose above the frightful din like shrieking
+winds above the roaring of a tempest.  And amid it all great Caesar stood
+with his back against the statue, like a lion at bay, and fought his
+assailants weaponless and hand to hand, with the defiant bearing and the
+unwavering courage which he had shown before on many a bloody field.
+Billy Trebonius and Caius Legarius struck him with their daggers and
+fell, as their brother-conspirators before them had fallen.  But at last,
+when Caesar saw his old friend Brutus step forward armed with a murderous
+knife, it is said he seemed utterly overpowered with grief and amazement,
+and, dropping his invincible left arm by his side, he hid his face in the
+folds of his mantle and received the treacherous blow without an effort
+to stay the hand that gave it.  He only said, "Et tu, Brute?" and fell
+lifeless on the marble pavement.
+
+We learn that the coat deceased had on when he was killed was the same
+one he wore in his tent on the afternoon of the day he overcame the
+Nervii, and that when it was removed from the corpse it was found to be
+cut and gashed in no less than seven different places.  There was nothing
+in the pockets.  It will be exhibited at the coroner's inquest, and will
+be damning proof of the fact of the killing.  These latter facts may be
+relied on, as we get them from Mark Antony, whose position enables him to
+learn every item of news connected with the one subject of absorbing
+interest of-to-day.
+
+LATER: While the coroner was summoning a jury, Mark Antony and other
+friends of the late Caesar got hold of the body, and lugged it off to the
+Forum, and at last accounts Antony and Brutus were making speeches over
+it and raising such a row among the people that, as we go to press, the
+chief of police is satisfied there is going to be a riot, and is taking
+measures accordingly.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WIDOW'S PROTEST
+
+One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice (said the
+banker's clerk) was there in Corning during the war.  Dan Murphy enlisted
+as a private, and fought very bravely.  The boys all liked him, and when
+a wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was too heavy
+work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a sutler.  He
+made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for him.  She was
+a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to keep money
+when she got it.  She didn't waste a penny.
+
+On the contrary, she began to get miserly as her bank-account grew.  She
+grieved to part with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working
+life she had known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and
+without a dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering
+so again.  Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their
+esteem and respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she
+would like to have him embalmed and sent home; when you know the usual
+custom was to dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then
+inform his friends what had become of him.  Mrs.  Murphy jumped to the
+conclusion that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her
+dead husband, and so she telegraphed "Yes."  It was at the "wake" that
+the bill for embalming arrived and was presented to the widow.
+
+She uttered a wild, sad wail that pierced every heart, and said,
+"Sivinty-foive dollars for stooffin' Dan, blister their sowls!  Did thim
+divils suppose I was goin' to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such
+expinsive curiassities !"
+
+The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST--[Written about 1866.]
+
+There was a fellow traveling around in that country," said Mr.
+Nickerson, "with a moral-religious show--a sort of scriptural panorama--
+and he hired a wooden-headed old slab to play the piano for him.  After
+the first night's performance the showman says:
+
+"'My friend, you seem to know pretty much all the tunes there are, and
+you worry along first rate.  But then, didn't you notice that sometimes
+last night the piece you happened to be playing was a little rough on the
+proprieties, so to speak--didn't seem to jibe with the general gait of
+the picture that was passing at the time, as it were--was a little
+foreign to the subject, you know--as if you didn't either trump or follow
+suit, you understand?'
+
+"'Well, no,' the fellow said; 'he hadn't noticed, but it might be; he had
+played along just as it came handy.'
+
+"So they put it up that the simple old dummy was to keep his eye on the
+panorama after that, and as soon as a stunning picture was reeled out he
+was to fit it to a dot with a piece of music that would help the audience
+to get the idea of the subject, and warm them up like a camp-meeting
+revival.  That sort of thing would corral their sympathies, the showman
+said.
+
+"There was a big audience that night-mostly middle-aged and old people
+who belong to the church, and took a strong interest in Bible matters,
+and the balance were pretty much young bucks and heifers--they always
+come out strong on panoramas, you know, because it gives them a chance to
+taste one another's complexions in the dark.
+
+"Well, the showman began to swell himself up for his lecture, and the old
+mud-Jobber tackled the piano and ran his fingers up and down once or
+twice to see that she was all right, and the fellows behind the curtain
+commenced to grind out the panorama.  The showman balanced his weight on
+his right foot, and propped his hands over his hips, and flung his eyes
+over his shoulder at the scenery, and said:
+
+"'Ladies and gentlemen, the painting now before you illustrates the
+beautiful and touching parable of the Prodigal Son.  Observe the happy
+expression just breaking over the features of the poor, suffering youth--
+so worn and weary with his long march; note also the ecstasy beaming from
+the uplifted countenance of the aged father, and the joy that sparkles in
+the eyes of the excited group of youths and maidens, and seems ready to
+burst into the welcoming chorus from their lips.  The lesson, my friends,
+is as solemn and instructive as the story is tender and beautiful.'
+
+"The mud-Jobber was all ready, and when the second speech was finished,
+struck up:
+
+                    "Oh, we'll all get blind drunk
+                    When Johnny comes marching home!
+
+"Some of the people giggled, and some groaned a little.  The showman
+couldn't say a word; he looked at the pianist sharp, but he was all
+lovely and serene--he didn't know there was anything out of gear.
+
+"The panorama moved on, and the showman drummed up his grit and started
+in fresh.
+
+"'Ladies and gentlemen, the fine picture now unfolding itself to your
+gaze exhibits one of the most notable events in Bible history--our
+Saviour and His disciples upon the Sea of Galilee.  How grand, how awe-
+inspiring are the reflections which the subject invokes!  What sublimity
+of faith is revealed to us in this lesson from the sacred writings!  The
+Saviour rebukes the angry waves, and walks securely upon the bosom of the
+deep!'
+
+"All around the house they were whispering, 'Oh, how lovely, how
+beautiful!' and the orchestra let himself out again:
+
+                    "A life on the ocean wave,
+                    And a home on the rolling deep!
+
+"There was a good deal of honest snickering turned on this time, and
+considerable groaning, and one or two old deacons got up and went out.
+The showman grated his teeth, and cursed the piano man to himself; but
+the fellow sat there like a knot on a log, and seemed to think he was
+doing first-rate.
+
+"After things got quiet the showman thought he would make one more
+stagger at it, anyway, though his confidence was beginning to get mighty
+shaky.  The supes started the panorama grinding along again, and he says:
+
+"'Ladies and gentlemen, this exquisite painting represents the raising of
+Lazarus from the dead by our Saviour.  The subject has been handled with
+marvelous skill by the artist, and such touching sweetness and tenderness
+of expression has he thrown into it that I have known peculiarly
+sensitive persons to be even affected to tears by looking at it.  Observe
+the half-confused, half-inquiring look upon the countenance of the
+awakened Lazarus.  Observe, also, the attitude and expression of the
+Saviour, who takes him gently by the sleeve of his shroud with one hand,
+while He points with the other toward the distant city.'
+
+"Before anybody could get off an opinion in the case the innocent old ass
+at the piano struck up:
+
+                    "Come rise up, William Ri-i-ley,
+                    And go along with me!
+
+"Whe-ew!  All the solemn old flats got up in a huff to go, and everybody
+else laughed till the windows rattled.
+
+"The showman went down and grabbed the orchestra and shook him up and
+says:
+
+"'That lets you out, you know, you chowder-headed old clam.  Go to the
+doorkeeper and get your money, and cut your stick--vamose the ranch!
+Ladies and gentlemen, circumstances over which I have no control compel
+me prematurely to dismiss the house.'"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CURING A COLD--[Written about 1864]
+
+It is a good thing, perhaps, to write for the amusement of the public,
+but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction,
+their profit, their actual and tangible benefit.  The latter is the sole
+object of this article.  If it prove the means of restoring to health one
+solitary sufferer among my race, of lighting up once more the fire of
+hope and joy in his faded eyes, or bringing back to his dead heart again
+the quick, generous impulses of other days, I shall be amply rewarded for
+my labor; my soul will be permeated with the sacred delight a Christian.
+feels when he has done a good, unselfish deed.
+
+Having led a pure and blameless life, I am justified in believing that no
+man who knows me will reject the suggestions I am about to make, out of
+fear that I am trying to deceive him.  Let the public do itself the honor
+to read my experience in doctoring a cold, as herein set forth, and then
+follow in my footsteps.
+
+When the White House was burned in Virginia City, I lost my home, my
+happiness, my constitution, and my trunk.  The loss of the two first
+named articles was a matter of no great consequence, since a home without
+a mother, or a sister, or a distant young female relative in it, to
+remind you, by putting your soiled linen out of sight and taking your
+boots down off the mantelpiece, that there are those who think about you
+and care for you, is easily obtained.  And I cared nothing for the loss
+of my happiness, because, not being a poet, it could not be possible that
+melancholy would abide with me long.  But to lose a good constitution and
+a better trunk were serious misfortunes.  On the day of the fire my
+constitution succumbed to a severe cold, caused by undue exertion in
+getting ready to do something.  I suffered to no purpose, too, because
+the plan I was figuring at for the extinguishing of the fire was so
+elaborate that I never got it completed until the middle of the following
+week.
+
+The first time I began to sneeze, a friend told me to go and bathe my
+feet in hot water and go to bed.  I did so.  Shortly afterward, another
+friend advised me to get up and take a cold shower-bath.  I did that
+also.  Within the hour, another friend assured me that it was policy to
+"feed a cold and starve a fever."  I had both.  So I thought it best to
+fill myself up for the cold, and then keep dark and let the fever starve
+awhile.
+
+In a case of, this kind, I seldom do things by halves; I ate pretty
+heartily; I conferred my custom upon a stranger who had just opened his
+restaurant that morning; he waited near me in respectful silence until I
+had finished feeding my cold, when he inquired if the people about
+Virginia City were much afflicted with colds?  I told him I thought they
+were.  He then went out and took in his sign.
+
+I started down toward the office, and on the way encountered another
+bosom friend, who told me that a quart of salt-water, taken warm, would
+come as near curing a cold as anything in the world.  I hardly thought I
+had room for it, but I tried it anyhow.  The result was surprising.  I
+believed I had thrown up my immortal soul.
+
+Now, as I am giving my experience only for the benefit of those who are
+troubled with the distemper I am writing about, I feel that they will see
+the propriety of my cautioning them against following such portions of it
+as proved inefficient with me, and acting upon this conviction, I warn
+them against warm salt-water.  It may be a good enough remedy, but I
+think it is too severe.  If I had another cold in the head, and there
+were no course left me but to take either an earthquake or a quart of
+warm saltwater, I would take my chances on the earthquake.
+
+After the storm which had been raging in my stomach had subsided, and no
+more good Samaritans happening along, I went on borrowing handkerchiefs
+again and blowing them to atoms, as had been my custom in the early
+stages of my cold, until I came across a lady who had just arrived from
+over the plains, and who said she had lived in a part of the country
+where doctors were scarce, and had from necessity acquired considerable
+skill in the treatment of simple "family complaints."  I knew she must
+have had much experience, for she appeared to be a hundred and fifty
+years old.
+
+She mixed a decoction composed of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and
+various other drugs, and instructed me to take a wine-glass full of it
+every fifteen minutes.  I never took but one dose; that was enough; it
+robbed me of all moral principle, and awoke every unworthy impulse of my
+nature.  Under its malign influence my brain conceived miracles of
+meanness, but my hands were too feeble to execute them; at that time, had
+it not been that my strength had surrendered to a succession of assaults
+from infallible remedies for my cold, I am satisfied that I would have
+tried to rob the graveyard.  Like most other people, I often feel mean,
+and act accordingly; but until I took that medicine I had never reveled
+in such supernatural depravity, and felt proud of it.  At the end of two
+days I was ready to go to doctoring again.  I took a few more unfailing
+remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs.
+
+I got to coughing incessantly, and my voice fell below zero; I conversed
+in a thundering bass, two octaves below my natural tone; I could only
+compass my regular nightly repose by coughing myself down to a state of
+utter exhaustion, and then the moment I began to talk in my sleep, my
+discordant voice woke me up again.
+
+My case grew more and more serious every day.  A Plain gin was
+recommended; I took it.  Then gin and molasses; I took that also.  Then
+gin and onions; I added the onions, and took all three.  I detected no
+particular result, however, except that I had acquired a breath like a
+buzzard's.
+
+I found I had to travel for my health.  I went to Lake Bigler with my
+reportorial comrade, Wilson.  It is gratifying to me to reflect that we
+traveled in considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my
+friend took all his baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk
+handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype of his grandmother.  We sailed and
+hunted and fished and danced all day, and I doctored my cough all night.
+By managing in this way, I made out to improve every hour in the twenty-
+four.  But my disease continued to grow worse.
+
+A sheet-bath was recommended.  I had never refused a remedy yet, and it
+seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a
+sheet-bath, notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it
+was.  It was administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty.
+My breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a
+thousand yards of it) soaked in ice-water, was wound around me until I
+resembled a swab for a Columbiad.
+
+It is a cruel expedient.  When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh,
+it makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men
+do in the death-agony.  It froze the marrow in my bones and stopped the
+beating of my heart.  I thought my time had come.
+
+Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a
+negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp,
+and came near being drowned.  He floundered around, though, and finally
+rose up out of the water considerably strangled and furiously angry, and
+started ashore at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with
+great asperity, that "one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to
+get killed wid jis' such damn foolishness as dis!"
+
+Never take a sheet-bath-never.  Next to meeting a lady acquaintance who,
+for reasons best known to herself, don't see you when she looks at you,
+and don't know you when she does see you, it is the most uncomfortable
+thing in the world.
+
+But, as I was saying, when the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough,
+a lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my
+breast.  I believe that would have cured me effectually, if it had not
+been for young Wilson.  When I went to bed, I put my mustard plaster--
+which was a very gorgeous one, eighteen inches square--where I could
+reach it when I was ready for it.  But young Wilson got hungry in the
+night, and here is food for the imagination.
+
+After sojourning a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and,
+besides the steam-baths, I took a lot of the vilest medicines that were
+ever concocted.  They would have cured me, but I had to go back to
+Virginia City, where, notwithstanding the variety of new remedies I
+absorbed every day, I managed to aggravate my disease by carelessness and
+undue exposure.
+
+I finally concluded to visit San Francisco, and the, first day I got
+there a lady at the hotel told me to drink a quart of whisky every
+twenty-four hours, and a friend up-town recommended precisely the same
+course.  Each advised me to take a quart; that made half a gallon.  I did
+it, and still live.
+
+Now, with the kindest motives in the world, I offer for the consideration
+of consumptive patients the variegated course of treatment I have lately
+gone through.  Let them try it; if it don't cure, it can't more than kill
+them.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION
+
+--[Published at the time of the "Comet Scare" in the summer of 1874]
+
+[We have received the following advertisement, but, inasmuch as it
+concerns a matter of deep and general interest, we feel fully justified
+in inserting it in our reading-columns.  We are confident that our
+conduct in this regard needs only explanation, not apology.--Ed., N. Y.
+Herald.]
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT
+
+This is to inform the public that in connection with Mr. Barnum I have
+leased the comet for a term, of years; and I desire also to solicit the
+public patronage in favor of a beneficial enterprise which we have in
+view.
+
+We propose to fit up comfortable, and even luxurious, accommodations in
+the comet for as many persons as will honor us with their patronage, and
+make an extended excursion among the heavenly bodies.  We shall prepare
+1,000,000 state-rooms in the tail of the comet (with hot and cold water,
+gas, looking-glass, parachute, umbrella, etc., in each), and shall
+construct more if we meet with a sufficiently generous encouragement.
+We shall have billiard-rooms, card-rooms, music-rooms, bowling-alleys and
+many spacious theaters and free libraries; and on the main deck we
+propose to have a driving park, with upward of 100,000 miles of roadway
+in it.  We shall publish daily newspapers also.
+
+
+                          DEPARTURE OF THE COMET
+
+The comet will leave New York at 10 P.M.  on the 20th inst., and
+therefore it will be desirable that the passengers be on board by eight
+at the latest, to avoid confusion in getting under way.  It is not known
+whether passports will be necessary or not, but it is deemed best that
+passengers provide them, and so guard against all contingencies.  No dogs
+will be allowed on board.  This rule has been made in deference to the
+existing state of feeling regarding these animals, and will be strictly
+adhered to.  The safety of the passengers will in all ways be jealously
+looked to.  A substantial iron railing will be put up all around the
+comet, and no one will be allowed to go to the edge and look over unless
+accompanied by either my partner or myself.
+
+
+                            THE POSTAL SERVICE
+
+will be of the completest character.  Of course the telegraph, and the
+telegraph only, will be employed; consequently friends occupying state-
+rooms 20,000,000 and even 30,000,000 miles apart will be able to send a
+message and receive a reply inside of eleven days.  Night messages will
+be half-rate.  The whole of this vast postal system will be under the
+personal superintendence of Mr. Hale of Maine.  Meals served at all
+hours.  Meals served in staterooms charged extra.
+
+Hostility is not apprehended from any great planet, but we have thought
+it best to err on the safe side, and therefore have provided a proper
+number of mortars, siege-guns, and boarding-pikes.  History shows that
+small, isolated communities, such as the people of remote islands, are
+prone to be hostile to strangers, and so the same may be the case with
+
+
+                         THE INHABITANTS OF STARS
+
+of the tenth or twentieth magnitude.  We shall in no case wantonly offend
+the people of any star, but shall treat all alike with urbanity and
+kindliness, never conducting ourselves toward an asteroid after a fashion
+which we could not venture to assume toward Jupiter or Saturn.  I repeat
+that we shall not wantonly offend any star; but at the same time we shall
+promptly resent any injury that may be done us, or any insolence offered
+us, by parties or governments residing in any star in the firmament.
+Although averse to the shedding of blood, we shall still hold this course
+rigidly and fearlessly, not only toward single stars, but toward
+constellations.  We shall hope to leave a good impression of America
+behind us in every nation we visit, from Venus to Uranus.  And, at all
+events, if we cannot inspire love we shall at least compel respect for
+our country wherever we go.  We shall take with us, free of charge,
+
+
+                      A GREAT FORCE OF MISSIONARIES,
+
+and shed the true light upon all the celestial orbs which, physically
+aglow, are yet morally in darkness.  Sunday-schools will be established
+wherever practicable.  Compulsory education will also be introduced.
+
+The comet will visit Mars first, and proceed to Mercury, Jupiter, Venus,
+and Saturn.  Parties connected with the government of the District of
+Columbia and with the former city government of New York, who may desire
+to inspect the rings, will be allowed time and every facility.  Every
+star of prominent magnitude will be visited, and time allowed for
+excursions to points of interest inland.
+
+
+                               THE DOG STAR
+
+has been stricken from the program.  Much time will be spent in the Great
+Bear, and, indeed, in every constellation of importance.  So, also, with
+the Sun and Moon and the Milky Pay, otherwise the Gulf Stream of the
+Skies.  Clothing suitable for wear in the sun should be provided.  Our
+program has been so arranged that we shall seldom go more than
+100,000,000 of miles at a time without stopping at some star.  This will
+necessarily make the stoppages frequent and preserve the interest of the
+tourist.  Baggage checked through to any point on the route.  Parties
+desiring to make only a part of the proposed tour, and thus save expense,
+may stop over at any star they choose and wait for the return voyage.
+
+After visiting all the most celebrated stars and constellations in our
+system and personally, inspecting the remotest sparks that even the most
+powerful telescope can now detect in the firmament, we shall proceed with
+good heart upon
+
+
+                           A STUPENDOUS VOYAGE
+
+of discovery among the countless whirling worlds that make turmoil in the
+mighty wastes of space that stretch their solemn solitudes, their
+unimaginable vastness billions upon billions of miles away beyond the
+farthest verge of telescopic vision, till by comparison the little
+sparkling vault we used to gaze at on Earth shall seem like a remembered
+phosphorescent flash of spangles which some tropical voyager's prow
+stirred into life for a single instant, and which ten thousand miles of
+phosphorescent seas and tedious lapse of time had since diminished to an
+incident utterly trivial in his recollection.  Children occupying seats
+at the first table will be charged full fare.
+
+
+                             FIRST-CLASS FARE
+
+from the Earth to Uranus, including visits to the Sun and Moon and all
+the principal planets on the route, will be charged at the low rate of
+$2 for every 50,000,000 miles of actual travel.  A great reduction will
+be made where parties wish to make the round trip.  This comet is new and
+in thorough repair and is now on her first voyage.  She is confessedly
+the fastest on the line.  She makes 20,000,000 miles a day, with her
+present facilities; but, with a picked American crew and good weather,
+we are confident we can get 40,000,000 out of her.  Still, we shall never
+push her to a dangerous speed, and we shall rigidly prohibit racing with
+other comets.  Passengers desiring to diverge at any point or return will
+be transferred to other comets.  We make close connections at all
+principal points with all reliable lines.  Safety can be depended upon.
+It is not to be denied that the heavens are infested with
+
+
+                          OLD RAMSHACKLE COMETS
+
+that have not been inspected or overhauled in 10,000 years, and which
+ought long ago to have been destroyed or turned into hail-barges, but
+with these we have no connection whatever.  Steerage passengers not
+allowed abaft the main hatch.
+
+Complimentary round-trip tickets have been tendered to General Butler,
+Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Richardson, and other eminent gentlemen, whose public
+services have entitled them to the rest and relaxation of a voyage of
+this kind.  Parties desiring to make the round trip will have extra
+accommodation.  The entire voyage will be completed, and the passengers
+landed in New York again, on the 14th of December, 1991.  This is, at
+least, forty years quicker than any other comet can do it in.  Nearly all
+the back-pay members contemplate making the round trip with us in case
+their constituents will allow them a holiday.  Every harmless amusement
+will be allowed on board, but no pools permitted on the run of the comet
+--no gambling of any kind.  All fixed stars will be respected by us, but
+such stars as seem, to need fixing we shall fix.  If it makes trouble, we
+shall be sorry, but firm.
+
+Mr. Coggia having leased his comet to us, she will no longer be called by
+his name, but by my partner's.  N. B.--Passengers by paying double fare
+will be entitled to a share in all the new stars, suns, moons, comets,
+meteors, and magazines of thunder and lightning we may discover.  Patent-
+medicine people will take notice that
+
+
+                         WE CARRY BULLETIN-BOARDS
+
+and a paint-brush along for use in the constellations, and are open to
+terms.  Cremationists are reminded that we are going straight to--some
+hot places--and are open to terms.  To other parties our enterprise is a
+pleasure excursion, but individually we mean business.  We shall fly our
+comet for all it is worth.
+
+
+                         FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS,
+
+or for freight or passage, apply on board, or to my partner, but not to
+me, since I do not take charge of the comet until she is under way.
+It is necessary, at a time like this, that my mind should not be burdened
+with small business details.
+
+                                                       MARK TWAIN.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR--[Written about 1870.]
+
+A few months ago I was nominated for Governor of the great state of New
+York, to run against Mr. John T. Smith and Mr. Blank J. Blank on an
+independent ticket.  I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage
+over these gentlemen, and that was--good character.  It was easy to see
+by the newspapers that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good
+name, that time had gone by.  It was plain that in these latter years
+they had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes.  But at the
+very moment that I was exalting my advantage and joying in it in secret,
+there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort "riling" the deeps of my
+happiness, and that was--the having to hear my name bandied about in
+familiar connection with those of such people.  I grew more and more
+disturbed.  Finally I wrote my grandmother about it.  Her answer came
+quick and sharp.  She said:
+
+     You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed
+     of--not one.  Look at the newspapers--look at them and comprehend
+     what sort of characters Messrs.  Smith and Blank are, and then see
+     if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a
+     public canvass with them.
+
+It was my very thought!  I did not sleep a single moment that night.
+But, after all, I could not recede.
+
+I was fully committed, and must go on with the fight.  As I was looking
+listlessly over the papers at breakfast I came across this paragraph,
+and I may truly say I never was so confounded before.
+
+     PERJURY.--Perhaps, now that Mr. Mark Twain is before the people as a
+     candidate for Governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to
+     be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses in Wakawak, Cochin
+     China, in 1863, the intent of which perjury being to rob a poor
+     native widow and her helpless family of a meager plantain-patch,
+     their only stay and support in their bereavement and desolation.
+     Mr. Twain owes it to himself, as well as to the great people whose
+     suffrages he asks, to clear this matter up.  Will he do it?
+
+I thought I should burst with amazement!  Such a cruel, heartless charge!
+I never had seen Cochin China!  I never had heard of Wakawak!  I didn't
+know a plantain-patch from a kangaroo!  I did not know what to do.  I was
+crazed and helpless.  I let the day slip away without doing anything at
+all.  The next morning the same paper had this--nothing more:
+
+     SIGNIFICANT.--Mr.  Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively
+     silent about the Cochin China perjury.
+
+[Mem.--During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to me in
+any other way than as "the infamous perjurer Twain."]
+
+Next came the Gazette, with this:
+
+     WANTED TO KNOW.--Will the new candidate for Governor deign to
+     explain to certain of his fellow-citizens (who are suffering to vote
+     for him!) the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Montana
+     losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these
+     things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his
+     "trunk" (newspaper he rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to
+     give him a friendly admonition for his own good, and so tarred and
+     feathered him, and rode him on a rail; and then advised him to leave
+     a permanent vacuum in the place he usually occupied in the camp.
+     Will he do this?
+
+Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that?  For I never was
+in Montana in my life.
+
+[After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as, "Twain, the Montana
+Thief."]
+
+I got to picking up papers apprehensively--much as one would lift a
+desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it.
+One day this met my eye:
+
+     THE LIE NAILED.--By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan,
+     Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr. Snub Rafferty and Mr. Catty
+     Mulligan, of Water Street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's
+     vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-
+     bearer, Blank J. Blank, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal
+     and gratuitous LIE, without a shadow of foundation in fact.  It is
+     disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to
+     to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their
+     graves, and defiling their honored names with slander.  When we
+     think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the
+     innocent relatives and friends of the deceased, we are almost driven
+     to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful
+     vengeance upon the traducer.  But no! let us leave him to the agony
+     of a lacerated conscience (though if passion should get the better
+     of the public, and in its blind fury they should do the traducer
+     bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict and
+     no court punish the perpetrators of the deed).
+
+The ingenious closing sentence had the effect of moving me out of bed
+with despatch that night, and out at the back door also, while the
+"outraged and insulted public" surged in the front way, breaking
+furniture and windows in their righteous indignation as they came,
+and taking off such property as they could carry when they went.
+And yet I can lay my hand upon the Book and say that I never slandered
+Mr. Blank's grandfather.  More: I had never even heard of him or
+mentioned him up to that day and date.
+
+[I will state, in passing, that the journal above quoted from always
+referred to me afterward as "Twain, the Body-Snatcher."]
+
+The next newspaper article that attracted my attention was the following:
+
+     A SWEET CANDIDATE.--Mr.  Mark Twain, who was to make such a
+     blighting speech at the mass-meeting of the Independents last night,
+     didn't come to time!  A telegram from his physician stated that he
+     had been knocked down by a runaway team, and his leg broken in two
+     places--sufferer lying in great agony, and so forth, and so forth,
+     and a lot more bosh of the same sort.  And the Independents tried
+     hard to swallow the wretched subterfuge, and pretend that they did
+     not know what was the real reason of the absence of the abandoned
+     creature whom they denominate their standard-bearer.  A certain man
+     was seen to reel into Mr.  Twain's hotel last night in a state of
+     beastly intoxication.  It is the imperative duty of the Independents
+     to prove that this besotted brute was not Mark Twain himself.  We
+     have them at last!  This is a case that admits of no shirking.  The
+     voice of the people demands in thunder tones, "WHO WAS THAT MAN?"
+
+It was incredible, absolutely incredible, for a moment, that it was
+really my name that was coupled with this disgraceful suspicion.  Three
+long years had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine or
+liquor or any kind.
+
+[It shows what effect the times were having on me when I say that I saw
+myself, confidently dubbed "Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain" in the next issue
+of that journal without a pang--notwithstanding I knew that with
+monotonous fidelity the paper would go on calling me so to the very end.]
+
+By this time anonymous letters were getting to be an important part of my
+mail matter.  This form was common
+
+     How about that old woman you kiked of your premises which
+     was beging.                             POL. PRY.
+
+And this:
+
+     There is things which you Have done which is unbeknowens to anybody
+     but me.  You better trot out a few dots, to yours truly, or you'll
+     hear through the papers from
+                                             HANDY ANDY.
+
+This is about the idea.  I could continue them till the reader was
+surfeited, if desirable.
+
+Shortly the principal Republican journal "convicted" me of wholesale
+bribery, and the leading Democratic paper "nailed" an aggravated case of
+blackmailing to me.
+
+[In this way I acquired two additional names: "Twain the Filthy
+Corruptionist" and "Twain the Loathsome Embracer."]
+
+By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an "answer" to all
+the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of
+my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any
+longer.   As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following
+appeared in one of the papers the very next day:
+
+     BEHOLD THE MAN!--The independent candidate still maintains silence.
+     Because he dare not speak.  Every accusation against him has been
+     amply proved, and they have been indorsed and reindorsed by his own
+     eloquent silence, till at this day he stands forever convicted.
+     Look upon your candidate, Independents!  Look upon the Infamous
+     Perjurer!  the Montana Thief!  the Body-Snatcher!  Contemplate your
+     incarnate Delirium Tremens!  your Filthy Corruptionist!  your
+     Loathsome Embracer!  Gaze upon him--ponder him well--and then say if
+     you can give your honest votes to a creature who has earned this
+     dismal array of titles by his hideous crimes, and dares not open his
+     mouth in denial of any one of them!
+
+There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so, in deep
+humiliation, I set about preparing to "answer" a mass of baseless charges
+and mean and wicked falsehoods.  But I never finished the task, for the
+very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity,
+and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all its
+inmates, because it obstructed the view from my house.  This threw me
+into a sort of panic.  Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get
+his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened.
+This drove me to the verge of distraction.  On top of this I was accused
+of employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food
+for the foundling' hospital when I warden.  I was wavering--wavering.
+And at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution
+that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children,
+of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness, were taught to rush
+onto the platform at a public meeting, and clasp me around the legs and
+call me PA!
+
+I gave it up.  I hauled down my colors and surrendered.  I was not equal
+to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the state of New York,
+and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of
+spirit signed it, "Truly yours, once a decent man, but now
+
+                    "MARK TWAIN, LP., M.T., B.S., D.T., F.C., and L.E."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A MYSTERIOUS VISIT
+
+
+The first notice that was taken of me when I "settled down" recently was
+by a gentleman who said he was an assessor, and connected with the U. S.
+Internal Revenue Department.  I said I had never heard of his branch of
+business before, but I was very glad to see him all the same.  Would he
+sit down?  He sat down.  I did not know anything particular to say, and
+yet I felt that people who have arrived at the dignity of keeping house
+must be conversational, must be easy and sociable in company.  So, in
+default of anything else to say, I asked him if he was opening his shop
+in our neighborhood.
+
+He said he was.  [I did not wish to appear ignorant, but I had hoped he
+would mention what he had for sale.]
+
+I ventured to ask him "How was trade?"  And he said "So-so."
+
+I then said we would drop in, and if we liked his house as well as any
+other, we would give him our custom.
+
+He said he thought we would like his establishment well enough to confine
+ourselves to it--said he never saw anybody who would go off and hunt up
+another man in his line after trading with him once.
+
+That sounded pretty complacent, but barring that natural expression of
+villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
+
+I do not know how it came about exactly, but gradually we appeared to
+melt down and run together, conversationally speaking, and then
+everything went along as comfortably as clockwork.
+
+We talked, and talked, and talked--at least I did; and we laughed, and
+laughed, and laughed--at least he did.  But all the time I had my
+presence of mind about me--I had my native shrewdness turned on "full
+head," as the engineers say.  I was determined to find out all about his
+business in spite of his obscure answers--and I was determined I would
+have it out of him without his suspecting what I was at.  I meant to trap
+him with a deep, deep ruse.  I would tell him all about my own business,
+and he would naturally so warm to me during this seductive burst of
+confidence that he would forget himself, and tell me all about his
+affairs before he suspected what I was about.  I thought to myself, My
+son, you little know what an old fox you are dealing with.  I said:
+
+"Now you never would guess what I made lecturing this winter and last
+spring?"
+
+"No--don't believe I could, to save me.  Let me see--let me see.   About
+two thousand dollars, maybe?  But no; no, sir, I know you couldn't have
+made that much.   Say seventeen hundred, maybe?"
+
+"Ha! ha!  I knew you couldn't.  My lecturing receipts for last spring and
+this winter were fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.  What
+do you think of that?"
+
+"Why, it is amazing-perfectly amazing.  I will make a note of it.  And
+you say even this wasn't all?"
+
+"All!  Why bless you, there was my income from the Daily Warwhoop for
+four months--about--about--well, what should you say to about eight
+thousand dollars, for instance?"
+
+"Say!  Why, I should say I should like to see myself rolling in just such
+another ocean of affluence.  Eight thousand!  I'll make a note of it.
+Why man!--and on top of all this am I to understand that you had still
+more income?"
+
+"Ha! ha! ha!  Why, you're only in the suburbs of it, so to speak.
+There's my book, The Innocents Abroad price $3.50 to $5, according to the
+binding.  Listen to me.  Look me in the eye.  During the last four months
+and a half, saying nothing of sales before that, but just simply during
+the four months and a half, we've sold ninety-five thousand copies of
+that book.  Ninety-five thousand!  Think of it.  Average four dollars a
+copy, say.  It's nearly four hundred thousand dollars, my son.  I get
+half."
+
+"The suffering Moses!  I'll set that down.  Fourteen-seven-fifty--eight-
+two hundred.  Total, say--well, upon my word, the grand total is about
+two hundred and thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars!  Is that
+possible?"
+
+"Possible!  If there's any mistake it's the other way.  Two hundred and
+fourteen thousand, cash, is my income for this year if I know how to
+cipher."
+
+Then the gentleman got up to go.  It came over me most uncomfortably that
+maybe I had made my revelations for nothing, besides being flattered into
+stretching them considerably by the stranger's astonished exclamations.
+But no; at the last moment the gentleman handed me a large envelope, and
+said it contained his advertisement; and that I would find out all about
+his business in it; and that he would be happy to have my custom-would,
+in fact, be proud to have the custom of a man of such prodigious income;
+and that he used to think there were several wealthy men in the city, but
+when they came to trade with him he discovered that they barely had
+enough to live on; and that, in truth, it had been such a weary, weary
+age since he had seen a rich man face to face, and talked to him, and
+touched him with his hands, that he could hardly refrain from embracing
+me--in fact, would esteem it a great favor if I would let him embrace me.
+
+This so pleased me that I did not try to resist, but allowed this simple-
+hearted stranger to throw his arms about me and weep a few tranquilizing
+tears down the back of my neck.  Then he went his way.
+
+As soon as he was gone I opened his advertisement.  I studied it
+attentively for four minutes.  I then called up the cook, and said:
+
+"Hold me while I faint!  Let Marie turn the griddle-cakes."
+
+By and by, when I came to, I sent down to the rum-mill on the corner and
+hired an artist by the week to sit up nights and curse that stranger, and
+give me a lift occasionally in the daytime when I came to a hard place.
+
+Ah, what a miscreant he was!  His "advertisement"  was nothing in the
+world but a wicked tax-return--a string of impertinent questions about
+my private affairs, occupying the best part of four fools-cap pages of
+fine print-questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous
+ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn't understand what the
+most of them were driving at--questions, too, that were calculated to
+make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from
+swearing to a falsehood.  I looked for a loophole, but there did not
+appear to be any.  Inquiry No. 1 covered my case as generously and as
+amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill:
+
+     What were your profits, during the past year, from any trade,
+     business, or vocation, wherever carried on?
+
+And that inquiry was backed up by thirteen others of an equally searching
+nature, the most modest of which required information as to whether I had
+committed any burglary or highway robbery, or, by any arson or other
+secret source of emolument had acquired property which was not enumerated
+in my statement of income as set opposite to inquiry No. 1.
+
+It was plain that that stranger had enabled me to make a goose of myself.
+It was very, very plain; and so I went out and hired another artist.
+By working on my vanity, the stranger had seduced me into declaring an
+income of two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars.  By law, one
+thousand dollars of this was exempt from income tax--the only relief I
+could see, and it was only a drop in the ocean.  At the legal five per
+cent., I must pay to the government the sum of ten thousand six hundred
+and fifty dollars, income tax!
+
+[I may remark, in this place, that I did not do it.]
+
+I am acquainted with a very opulent man, whose house is a palace, whose
+table is regal, whose outlays are enormous, yet a man who has no income,
+as I have often noticed by the revenue returns; and to him I went for
+advice in my distress.  He took my dreadful exhibition of receipts, he
+put on his glasses, he took his pen, and presto!--I was a pauper!  It was
+the neatest thing that ever was.  He did it simply by deftly manipulating
+the bill of "DEDUCTIONS."  He set down my "State, national, and municipal
+taxes" at so much; my "losses by shipwreck; fire, etc.," at so much; my
+"losses on sales of real estate"--on "live stock sold"--on "payments for
+rent of homestead"--on "repairs, improvements, interest"--on "previously
+taxed salary as an officer of the United States army, navy, revenue
+service," and other things.  He got astonishing "deductions" out of each
+and every one of these matters--each and every one of them.  And when he
+was done he handed me the paper, and I saw at a glance that during the
+year my income, in the way of profits, had been one thousand two hundred
+and fifty dollars and forty cents.
+
+"Now," said he, "the thousand dollars is exempt by law.  What you want to
+do is to go and swear this document in and pay tax on the two hundred and
+fifty dollars."
+
+[While he was making this speech his little boy Willie lifted a two-
+dollar greenback out of his vest pocket and vanished with it, and I would
+wager; anything that if my stranger were to call on that little boy to-
+morrow he would make a false return of his income.]
+
+"Do you," said I, "do you always work up the 'deductions' after this
+fashion in your own case, sir?"
+
+"Well, I should say so!  If it weren't for those eleven saving clauses
+under the head of 'Deductions' I should be beggared every year to support
+this hateful and wicked, this extortionate and tyrannical government."
+
+This gentleman stands away up among the very best of the solid men of the
+city--the men of moral weight, of commercial integrity, of unimpeachable,
+social spotlessness--and so I bowed to his example.  I went down to the
+revenue office, and under the accusing eyes of my old visitor I stood up
+and swore to lie after lie, fraud after fraud, villainy after villainy,
+till my soul was coated inches and inches thick with perjury, and my
+self-respect gone for ever and ever.
+
+But what of it?  It is nothing more than thousands of the richest and
+proudest, and most respected, honored, and courted men in America do
+every year.  And so I don't care.  I am not ashamed.  I shall simply,
+for the present, talk little and eschew fire-proof gloves, lest I fall
+into certain dreadful habits irrevocably.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Sketches New and Old,
+by Mark Twain
+
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, Complete</title>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+<link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg">
+
+
+<style type="text/css">
+    <!--
+		body {background:#faebd7; margin:10%; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent:   1em;
+        margin-top:    .75em;
+        margin-bottom: .75em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; }
+    HR  { width: 33%; text-align: center; }
+		blockquote {font-size: 97% }
+		.figleft   {float: left;}
+    .figright  {float: right;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 15%; margin-bottom: 0em;}
+    CENTER { padding: 10px;}
+    // -->
+</style>
+
+
+
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<h2><a href="#contents">SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, Complete</a></h2>
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sketches New and Old, Complete
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Sketches New and Old, Complete
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #3189]
+Last Updated: December 31, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="contents"></a>
+<br>
+
+                                <h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="" cellPadding=4 border=3>
+
+
+<tr><td><a href="p1.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 1.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p2.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 2.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p3.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 3.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p4.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 4.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p5.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 5.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p6.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 6.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p7.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 7.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+
+
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<h2>LIST OF STORIES</h2>
+
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+<h3>1</h3>
+<a href="#preface">PREFACE</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#watch">MY WATCH</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#political">POLITICAL ECONOMY</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#frog">THE JUMPING FROG</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#journalism">JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#badboy">THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#goodboy">THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#poems">A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#niagara">NIAGARA</a><br>
+<h3>2</h3>
+<a href="p2.htm#answers">ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#poultry">TO RAISE POULTRY</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#croup">EXPERIENCE OF THE MCWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#venture">MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#newark">HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#bore">THE OFFICE BORE</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#greer">JOHNNY GREER</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#beef">THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#fisher">THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER</a><br>
+<h3>3</h3>
+<a href="p3.htm#persecution">DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#spirited">THE JUDGES "SPIRITED WOMAN"</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#information">INFORMATION WANTED</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#oldboys">SOME LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#senatorial">MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#fashion">A FASHION ITEM</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#riley">RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#oldman">A FINE OLD MAN</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#science">SCIENCE vs. LUCK</a><br>
+<h3>4</h3>
+<a href="p4.htm#franklin">THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#bloke">MR. BLOKE'S ITEM</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#medieval">A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#petition">PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#afterdinner">AFTER-DINNER SPEECH</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#murderers">LIONIZING MURDERERS</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#newcrime">A NEW CRIME</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#dream">A CURIOUS DREAM</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#truestory">A TRUE STORY</a><br>
+<h3>5</h3>
+<a href="p5.htm#twins">THE SIAMESE TWINS</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#scottish">SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#ghost">A GHOST STORY</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#venus">THE CAPITOLINE VENUS</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#insurance">SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#chinaman">JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#agricultural">HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#petrified">THE PETRIFIED MAN</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#massacre">MY BLOODY MASSACRE</a><br>
+<h3>6</h3>
+<a href="p6.htm#undertaker">THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#chambermaids">CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#aurelia">AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#jenkins">"AFTER" JENKINS</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#barbers">ABOUT BARBERS</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#ireland">"PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#resignation">THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#history">HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#curiosity">HONORED AS A CURIOSITY</a><br>
+<h3>7</h3>
+<a href="p7.htm#ward">FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#cannibalism">CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#caesar">THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#widow">THE WIDOW'S PROTEST</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#panoramist">THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#cold">CURING A COLD</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#excursion">A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#governor">RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#mysterious">A MYSTERIOUS VISIT</a><br>
+<br>
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Complete</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+
+<a name="preface"></a>
+<br><br>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never
+been in print before (such as "Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and
+Girls," the "Jumping Frog restored to the English tongue after martyrdom
+in the French," the "Membranous Croup" sketch, and many others which I
+need not specify): not doing this in order to make an advertisement of
+it, but because these things seemed instructive.</p>
+
+<p>HARTFORD, 1875.</p>
+                                             <p>MARK TWAIN.</p>
+
+<br><br>
+
+                                <h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="" cellPadding=4 border=3>
+
+
+<tr><td><a href="p1.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 1.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p2.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 2.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p3.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 3.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p4.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 4.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p5.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 5.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p6.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 6.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p7.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 7.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+
+
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sketches New and Old, Complete
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, COMPLETE ***
+
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+</body>
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+
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, Complete</title>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+<link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg">
+
+
+<style type="text/css">
+    <!--
+		body {background:#faebd7; margin:10%; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent:   1em;
+        margin-top:    .75em;
+        margin-bottom: .75em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; }
+    HR  { width: 33%; text-align: center; }
+		blockquote {font-size: 97% }
+		.figleft   {float: left;}
+    .figright  {float: right;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 15%; margin-bottom: 0em;}
+    CENTER { padding: 10px;}
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+</head>
+<body>
+
+<h2><a href="#contents">SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, Complete</a></h2>
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sketches New and Old, Complete
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Sketches New and Old, Complete
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #3189]
+Last Updated: December 31, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="contents"></a>
+<br>
+
+                                <h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="" cellPadding=4 border=3>
+
+
+<tr><td><a href="p1.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 1.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p2.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 2.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p3.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 3.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p4.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 4.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p5.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 5.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p6.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 6.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p7.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 7.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+
+
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<h2>LIST OF STORIES</h2>
+
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+<h3>1</h3>
+<a href="#preface">PREFACE</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#watch">MY WATCH</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#political">POLITICAL ECONOMY</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#frog">THE JUMPING FROG</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#journalism">JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#badboy">THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#goodboy">THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#poems">A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE</a><br>
+<a href="p1.htm#niagara">NIAGARA</a><br>
+<h3>2</h3>
+<a href="p2.htm#answers">ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#poultry">TO RAISE POULTRY</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#croup">EXPERIENCE OF THE MCWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#venture">MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#newark">HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#bore">THE OFFICE BORE</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#greer">JOHNNY GREER</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#beef">THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT</a><br>
+<a href="p2.htm#fisher">THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER</a><br>
+<h3>3</h3>
+<a href="p3.htm#persecution">DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#spirited">THE JUDGES "SPIRITED WOMAN"</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#information">INFORMATION WANTED</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#oldboys">SOME LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#senatorial">MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#fashion">A FASHION ITEM</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#riley">RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#oldman">A FINE OLD MAN</a><br>
+<a href="p3.htm#science">SCIENCE vs. LUCK</a><br>
+<h3>4</h3>
+<a href="p4.htm#franklin">THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#bloke">MR. BLOKE'S ITEM</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#medieval">A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#petition">PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#afterdinner">AFTER-DINNER SPEECH</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#murderers">LIONIZING MURDERERS</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#newcrime">A NEW CRIME</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#dream">A CURIOUS DREAM</a><br>
+<a href="p4.htm#truestory">A TRUE STORY</a><br>
+<h3>5</h3>
+<a href="p5.htm#twins">THE SIAMESE TWINS</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#scottish">SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#ghost">A GHOST STORY</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#venus">THE CAPITOLINE VENUS</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#insurance">SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#chinaman">JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#agricultural">HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#petrified">THE PETRIFIED MAN</a><br>
+<a href="p5.htm#massacre">MY BLOODY MASSACRE</a><br>
+<h3>6</h3>
+<a href="p6.htm#undertaker">THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#chambermaids">CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#aurelia">AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#jenkins">"AFTER" JENKINS</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#barbers">ABOUT BARBERS</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#ireland">"PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#resignation">THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#history">HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF</a><br>
+<a href="p6.htm#curiosity">HONORED AS A CURIOSITY</a><br>
+<h3>7</h3>
+<a href="p7.htm#ward">FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#cannibalism">CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#caesar">THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#widow">THE WIDOW'S PROTEST</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#panoramist">THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#cold">CURING A COLD</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#excursion">A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#governor">RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR</a><br>
+<a href="p7.htm#mysterious">A MYSTERIOUS VISIT</a><br>
+<br>
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Complete</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+
+<a name="preface"></a>
+<br><br>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never
+been in print before (such as "Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and
+Girls," the "Jumping Frog restored to the English tongue after martyrdom
+in the French," the "Membranous Croup" sketch, and many others which I
+need not specify): not doing this in order to make an advertisement of
+it, but because these things seemed instructive.</p>
+
+<p>HARTFORD, 1875.</p>
+                                             <p>MARK TWAIN.</p>
+
+<br><br>
+
+                                <h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="" cellPadding=4 border=3>
+
+
+<tr><td><a href="p1.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 1.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p2.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 2.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p3.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 3.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p4.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 4.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p5.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 5.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p6.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 6.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="p7.htm"><big><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;Part 7.</b></big></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+
+
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sketches New and Old, Complete
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, COMPLETE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 3189-h.htm or 3189-h.zip *****
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/old/orig3189-h/p1.htm b/old/orig3189-h/p1.htm
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, Part 1</title>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+
+
+
+<style type="text/css">
+    <!--
+		body { background:#faebd7; margin:10%; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent:   1em;
+        margin-top:    .75em;
+        margin-bottom: .75em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; }
+    HR  { width: 33%; text-align: center; }
+		blockquote {font-size: 97% }
+		.figleft   {float: left;}
+    .figright  {float: right;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 15%; margin-bottom: 0em;}
+    CENTER { padding: 10px;}
+    // -->
+</style>
+
+
+
+</head>
+<body>
+
+
+
+<center>
+<table summary="" cellPadding=4 border=3>
+<tr><td>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p2.htm">Next Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="3189-h.htm">Main Index</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+
+ 
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Part 1.</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS:</h2>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+<a href="#watch">MY WATCH</a><br><br>
+<a href="#political">POLITICAL ECONOMY</a><br><br>
+<a href="#frog">THE JUMPING FROG</a><br><br>
+<a href="#journalism">JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE</a><br><br>
+<a href="#badboy">THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY</a><br><br>
+<a href="#goodboy">THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY</a><br><br>
+<a href="#poems">A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE</a><br><br>
+<a href="#niagara">NIAGARA</a><br>
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br><br><br>
+
+
+<center><h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD</h1></center>
+<h2>Part 1.</h2>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="watch"></a>MY WATCH</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE&mdash;[Written about 1870.]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p017.jpg (147K)" src="images/p017.jpg" height="883" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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,</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p018.jpg (23K)" src="images/p018.jpg" height="429" width="341">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p019.jpg (28K)" src="images/p019.jpg" height="441" width="347">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>He said:</p>
+
+<p>"She makes too much steam&mdash;you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the
+safety-valve!"</p>
+
+<p>I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="political">POLITICAL ECONOMY</a></h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p021.jpg (104K)" src="images/p021.jpg" height="881" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>     Political Economy is the basis of all good government.  The wisest
+     men of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the&mdash;
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>[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&mdash;go on&mdash;what about it?"  He said there was nothing about it, in
+particular&mdash;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&mdash;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.]</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br> 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&mdash;
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>[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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;"
+"There, now, there," I said, "put on the other eight&mdash;add five hundred
+feet of spiral-twist&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.]</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>     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&mdash;
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>[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&mdash;"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!&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;further than to smile sweetly&mdash;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.]</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>     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:
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>                    Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,
+<br>                    Post mortem unum, ante bellum,
+<br>                    Hic jacet hoc, ex-parte res,
+<br>                    Politicum e-conomico est.
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>     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&mdash;
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>["Now, not a word out of you&mdash;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?&mdash;'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."]</p>
+
+<p>THREE DAYS LATER.&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p026.jpg (86K)" src="images/p026.jpg" height="524" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="frog"></a>THE JUMPING FROG</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1865]</h3></center>
+<br>
+<img alt="p028.jpg (125K)" src="images/p028.jpg" height="867" width="650">
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><h3>IN ENGLISH.  THEN IN FRENCH.  THEN CLAWED BACK INTO A CIVILIZED LANGUAGE
+ONCE MORE BY PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL.</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;, and after the latter my retranslation from the
+French]</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br>
+<center><h3>THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY<br> [Pronounced Cal-e-va-ras]</h3>
+</center>
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p030.jpg (44K)" src="images/p030.jpg" height="483" width="385">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Rev. Leonidas W.  H'm, Reverend Le&mdash;well, there was a feller here, once
+by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49&mdash;or maybe it was the
+spring of '50&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p031.jpg (27K)" src="images/p031.jpg" height="433" width="355">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;he'd bet on any thing&mdash;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&mdash;thank the Lord for his inf'nite mercy&mdash;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.'</p>
+
+<p>"Thish-yer Smiley had a mare&mdash;the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag,
+but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster than
+that&mdash;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&mdash;and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near
+as you could cipher it down.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;which was the
+name of the pup&mdash;Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was
+satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;and I believe him.  Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster
+down here on this floor&mdash;Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p033.jpg (37K)" src="images/p033.jpg" height="573" width="591">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;a stranger in the camp, he was&mdash;come acrost him with his box, and says:</p>
+
+<p>"'What might it be that you've got in the box?'</p>
+
+<p>"And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, 'It might be a parrot, or it
+might be a canary, maybe, but it ain't&mdash;it's only just a frog.'</p>
+
+<p>"And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round
+this way and that, and says, 'H'm&mdash;so 'tis.  Well, what's HE good for.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' Smiley says, easy and careless, 'he's good enough for one thing,
+I should judge&mdash;he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.</p>
+
+<p>"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.'</p>
+
+<p>"'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.'</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"And then Smiley says, 'That's all right&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;filled him pretty near up to his chin&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"'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&mdash;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&mdash;so&mdash;like a Frenchman, but it warn't no use&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;so&mdash;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.'</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;I wonder if there ain't something the matter with
+him&mdash;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&mdash;he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never
+ketched him.  And&mdash;"</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p035.jpg (39K)" src="images/p035.jpg" height="487" width="385">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>[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&mdash;I ain't going to be
+gone a second."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me
+and recommenced:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about
+the afflicted cow, but took my leave.</p>
+
+<br><br>
+<p>
+Now let the learned look upon this picture and say if iconoclasm can
+further go:</p>
+
+<center><p>[From the Revue des Deux Mondes, of July 15th, 1872.]</p>
+<br>
+          .......................
+<br>
+<h3>THE JUMPING FROG</h3></center>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+
+<p>
+[From the Revue des Deux Mondes, of July 15th, 1872.]
+</p>
+<pre>
+          .......................
+	
+</pre>
+<center>
+LA GRENOUILLE SAUTEUSE DU COMTE DE CALAVERAS
+</center>
+<p>
+"&mdash;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;&mdash;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:&mdash;Eh bien! je gage deux et demi qu'elle mourra tout
+de même.
+</p>
+<p>
+"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.&mdash;-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:&mdash;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?&mdash;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,&mdash;Daniel Webster était le nom de la grenouille,&mdash;et lui
+chanter: Des mouches! Daniel, des mouches!&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Un jour, un individu étranger au camp l'arrête aver sa boîte et lui
+dit:&mdash;Qu'est-ce que vous avez donc serré là dedans?
+</p>
+<p>
+"Smiley dit d'un air indifférent:&mdash;Cela pourrait être un perroquet ou un
+serin, mais ce n'est rien de pareil, ce n'est qu'une grenouille.
+</p>
+<p>
+"L'individu la prend, la regarde avec soin, la tourne d'un côté et de
+l'autre puis il dit.&mdash;Tiens! en effet!  A quoi estelle bonne?
+</p>
+<p>
+"&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+"L'individu reprend la boîte, l'examine de nouveau longuement, et la rend
+à Smiley en disant d'un air délibéré:&mdash;Eh bien! je ne vois pas que cette
+grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune grenouille.
+</p>
+<p>
+"&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+"L'individu réfléchit une seconde et dit comme attristé:&mdash;Je ne suis
+qu'un étranger ici, je n'ai pas de grenouille; mais, si j'en
+avais une, je tiendrais le pari.
+</p>
+<p>
+"&mdash;Fort bien! répond Smiley.  Rien de plus facile. Si vous voulez tenir
+ma boîte une minute, j'irai vous chercher une grenouille.&mdash;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:&mdash;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:&mdash;Un, deux, trois, sautez!
+</p>
+<p>
+"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:&mdash;Eh bien! je ne vois pas qua cette grenouille ait rien de muiex
+qu'une autre.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Smiley se gratta longtemps la tête, les yeux fixés sur Daniel; jusqu'à
+ce qu'enfin il dit:&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Il empoigne Daniel par la peau du cou, le souléve et dit:&mdash;Le loup me
+croque, s'il ne pèse pas cinq livres.
+</p>
+<p>
+"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 ...."
+</p>
+<p>
+[Translation of the above back from the French:]
+</p>
+<center>
+THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS
+</center>
+<p>
+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
+&mdash;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&mdash;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."
+</p>
+<p>
+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?&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;this was the name of the dog&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&mdash;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&mdash;and I him
+believe.  Tenez, I him have seen pose Daniel Webster there upon this
+plank&mdash;Daniel Webster was the name of the frog&mdash;and to him sing, "Some
+flies, Daniel, some flies!"&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+One day an individual stranger at the camp him arrested with his box and
+him said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"What is this that you have them shut up there within?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Smiley said, with an air indifferent:
+</p>
+<p>
+"That could be a paroquet, or a syringe (ou un serin), but this no is
+nothing of such, it not is but a frog."
+</p>
+<p>
+The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side
+and from the other, then he said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Tiens! in effect!&mdash;At what is she good?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"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."
+</p>
+<p>
+The individual retook the box, it examined of new longly, and it rendered
+to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate:
+</p>
+<p>
+"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.&mdash;M.  T.]
+</p>
+<p>
+"Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley, "possible that you&mdash;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."
+</p>
+<p>
+The individual reflected a second, and said like sad:
+</p>
+<p>
+"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."
+</p>
+<p>
+"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)."
+</p>
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now if you be ready, put him all against Daniel with their before feet
+upon the same line, and I give the signal"&mdash;then he added: "One, two,
+three&mdash;advance!"
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;like that&mdash;at the poor Daniel, in saying with his air
+deliberate&mdash;(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):
+</p>
+<p>
+"Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another."
+</p>
+<p>
+Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel,
+until that which at last he said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"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."
+</p>
+<p>
+He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds:"
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+HARTFORD, March, 1875.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="journalism"></a>JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1871]</h3></center>
+<br>
+<center><img alt="p044.jpg (134K)" src="images/p044.jpg" height="868" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>     The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a
+     correspondent who posted him as a Radical:&mdash;"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."&mdash;Exchange.
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I wrote as follows:</p>
+<br><br>
+                    <center><h3>SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS</h3></center>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>     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.
+<br>
+<br>     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.
+<br><br>
+     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.
+<br><br>
+     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.
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said he, "that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano&mdash;he
+was due yesterday."  And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and
+fired&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"That stove is utterly ruined," said the chief editor.</p>
+
+<p>I said I believed it was.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, no matter&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+<br><br>
+
+                    <center><h3>SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS</h3></center>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>  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&mdash;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.
+<br><br>
+     That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of
+     Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.
+<br><br>
+     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.
+<br><br>
+     Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement&mdash;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.
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>"Now that is the way to write&mdash;peppery and to the point.  Mush-and-milk
+journalism gives me the fan-tods."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I began to feel in the way.</p>
+
+<p>The chief said, "That was the Colonel, likely.  I've been expecting him
+for two days.  He will be up now right away."</p>
+
+<p>He was correct.  The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward with
+a dragoon revolver in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this
+mangy sheet?"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Right, Sir.  I have a little account to settle with you.  If you are at
+leisure we will begin."</p>
+
+<p>"I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual
+Development in America' to finish, but there is no hurry.  Begin."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He continued, "Jones will be here at three&mdash;cowhide him.  Gillespie will
+call earlier, perhaps&mdash;throw him out of the window.  Ferguson will be
+along about four&mdash;kill him.  That is all for today, I believe.  If you
+have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police&mdash;give
+the chief inspector rats.  The cowhides are under the table; weapons in
+the drawer&mdash;ammunition there in the corner&mdash;lint and bandages up there in
+the pigeonholes.  In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon,
+downstairs.  He advertises&mdash;we take it out in trade."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p049.jpg (68K)" src="images/p049.jpg" height="527" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>He said, "You'll like this place when you get used to it."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the
+hospital.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p050.jpg (64K)" src="images/p050.jpg" height="406" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="badboy"></a>THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1865]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p051.jpg (111K)" src="images/p051.jpg" height="872" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>He didn't have any sick mother, either&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p052.jpg (27K)" src="images/p052.jpg" height="434" width="349">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;everything turned out
+differently with him from the way it does to the bad Jameses in the
+books.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p054.jpg (27K)" src="images/p054.jpg" height="429" width="343">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>This Jim bore a charmed life&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p055.jpg (25K)" src="images/p055.jpg" height="421" width="339">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="goodboy"></a>THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1865]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p056.jpg (100K)" src="images/p056.jpg" height="880" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;to live right, and hang on as long as
+he could, and have his dying speech all ready when his time came.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p058.jpg (34K)" src="images/p058.jpg" height="439" width="341">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;it never had in
+any book that ever he had read.  He could hardly believe his senses.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p060.jpg (27K)" src="images/p060.jpg" height="441" width="350">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;[This glycerin catastrophe is borrowed from a floating
+newspaper item, whose author's name I would give if I knew it.&mdash;M. T.]</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="poems"></a>A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1865]</h3></center>
+<br>
+<br>
+<center><h3>THOSE EVENING BELLS</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+      <center><p>BY THOMAS MOORE</p></center>
+
+
+<br>
+          Those evening bells! those evening bells!<br>
+          How many a tale their music tells<br>
+          Of youth, and home, and that sweet time<br>
+          When last I heard their soothing chime.<br>
+<br>
+          Those joyous hours are passed away;<br>
+          And many a heart that then was gay,<br>
+          Within the tomb now darkly dwells,<br>
+          And hears no more those evening bells.<br>
+<br>
+          And so 'twill be when I am gone<br>
+          That tuneful peal will still ring on;<br>
+          While other bards shall walk these dells,<br>
+          And sing your praise, sweet evening bells.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br><br>
+                        <center><h3> THOSE ANNUAL BILLS</h3><br>
+<br>
+<p>                           BY MARK TWAIN</p></center><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+          These annual bills! these annual bills!<br>
+          How many a song their discord trills<br>
+          Of "truck" consumed, enjoyed, forgot,<br>
+          Since I was skinned by last year's lot!<br>
+<br>
+          Those joyous beans are passed away;<br>
+          Those onions blithe, O where are they?<br>
+          Once loved, lost, mourned&mdash;now vexing ILLS<br>
+          Your shades troop back in annual bills!<br>
+<br>
+          And so 'twill be when I'm aground<br>
+          These yearly duns will still go round,<br>
+          While other bards, with frantic quills,<br>
+          Shall damn and damn these annual bills!<br>
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="niagara"></a>NIAGARA</h2></center>
+
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1871]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p063.jpg (103K)" src="images/p063.jpg" height="898" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p065.jpg (48K)" src="images/p065.jpg" height="356" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p066.jpg (48K)" src="images/p066.jpg" height="887" width="279">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;venerable ruin, speak!"</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p068.jpg (49K)" src="images/p068.jpg" height="585" width="511">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>The relic said:</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>I went away from there.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p069.jpg (27K)" src="images/p069.jpg" height="428" width="339">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>The maiden said:</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>I adjourned from there also.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;you, Devourer of Mountains&mdash;you, Roaring
+Thundergust&mdash;you, Bully Boy with a Glass eye&mdash;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!&mdash;and Red jacket! and Hole in the
+Day!&mdash;and Whoopdedoodledo!  Emulate their achievements!  Unfurl yourselves
+under my banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Down wid him!"  "Scoop the blaggard!"  "Burn him!"  "Hang him!"
+"Dhround him!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;chasing a chip and gaining on it&mdash;each
+round trip a half-mile&mdash;reaching for the same bush on the bank forty-four
+times, and just exactly missing it by a hair's-breadth every time.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Got a match?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; in my other vest.  Help me out, please."</p>
+
+<p>"Not for Joe."</p>
+
+<p>When I came round again, I said:</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a drowning man, but will
+you explain this singular conduct of yours?"</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p071.jpg (40K)" src="images/p071.jpg" height="435" width="349">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"With pleasure.  I am the coroner.  Don't hurry on my account.  I can
+wait for you.  But I wish I had a match."</p>
+
+<p>I said: "Take my place, and I'll go and get you one."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Thus I escaped.  I am now lying in a very critical condition.  At least I
+am lying anyway&mdash;-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.</p>
+
+<p>Upon regaining my right mind, I said:</p>
+
+<p>"It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the beadwork and
+moccasins for Niagara Falls, doctor.  Where are they from?"</p>
+
+<p>"Limerick, my son."</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br>
+
+
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+<table summary="" cellPadding=4 border=3>
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+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p2.htm">Next Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
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+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p1.htm">Previous Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
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+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="3189-h.htm">Main Index</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
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+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p3.htm">Next Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+
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+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Part 2.</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS:</h2>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+
+<a href="#answers">ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#poultry">TO RAISE POULTRY</a><br><br>
+<a href="#croup">EXPERIENCE OF THE MCWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP</a><br><br>
+<a href="#venture">MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE</a><br><br>
+<a href="#newark">HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK</a><br><br>
+<a href="#bore">THE OFFICE BORE</a><br><br>
+<a href="#greer">JOHNNY GREER</a><br><br>
+<a href="#beef">THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT</a><br><br>
+<a href="#fisher">THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER</a><br><br>
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="answers"></a>ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS</h2></center>
+
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1865]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p072.jpg (117K)" src="images/p072.jpg" height="861" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"MORAL STATISTICIAN."&mdash;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.</p>
+<br>
+<p>
+"YOUNG AUTHOR."&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+<br>
+<p>
+"SIMON WHEELER," Sonora.&mdash;The following simple and touching remarks and
+accompanying poem have just come to hand from the rich gold-mining region
+of Sonora:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br> 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&mdash;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.
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+		 <br>
+                    HE DONE HIS LEVEL BEST<br><br>
+
+                    Was he a mining on the flat&mdash;<br>
+                    He done it with a zest;<br>
+                    Was he a leading of the choir&mdash;<br>
+                    He done his level best.<br>
+<br>
+                    If he'd a reg'lar task to do,<br>
+                    He never took no rest;<br>
+                    Or if 'twas off-and-on&mdash;the same&mdash;<br>
+                    He done his level best.<br>
+<br>
+                    If he was preachin' on his beat,<br>
+                    He'd tramp from east to west,<br>
+                    And north to south-in cold and heat<br>
+                    He done his level best.<br>
+<br>
+                    He'd yank a sinner outen (Hades),**<br>
+                    And land him with the blest;<br>
+                    Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,<br>
+                    And do his level best.<br>
+
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+<p>   **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.</p>
+
+
+		 <center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+
+                    He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,<br>
+                    And dance and drink and jest,<br>
+                    And lie and steal&mdash;all one to him&mdash;<br>
+                    He done his level best.<br>
+<br>
+                    Whate'er this man was sot to do,<br>
+                    He done it with a zest;<br>
+                    No matter what his contract was,<br>
+                    HE'D DO HIS LEVEL BEST.<br>
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<br>
+<p>
+"PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR."&mdash;NO; you are not obliged to take greenbacks at
+par.</p>
+<br>
+<p>
+"MELTON MOWBRAY," Dutch Flat.&mdash;This correspondent sends a lot of
+doggerel, and says it has been regarded as very good in Dutch Flat.  I
+give a specimen verse:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>          The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
+<br>          And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold;
+<br>          And the sheen of his spears was like stars on the sea,
+<br>          When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.**
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>  **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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;something like "Johnny Comes Marching Home."  However,
+keep on practising, and you may succeed yet.  There is genius in you, but
+too much blubber.</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br> "ST. CLAIR HIGGINS." Los Angeles.&mdash;"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?"
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>You should set your affections on another also&mdash;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.</p>
+<br>
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br> "ARITHMETICUS." Virginia, Nevada.&mdash;"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?"
+
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>I don't know.</p>
+<br>
+<p>
+"AMBITIOUS LEARNER," Oakland.&mdash;Yes; you are right America was not
+discovered by Alexander Selkirk.</p>
+<br>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br> "DISCARDED LOVER."&mdash;"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?"
+
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>Of course you have.  All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.
+The intention and not the act constitutes crime&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;I think I could do that, if it would afford you any
+comfort.</p>
+<br>
+<p>
+"ARTHUR AUGUSTUS."&mdash;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.</p>
+<br>
+<p>
+"YOUNG MOTHER."&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<br>
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>
+     "ARITHMETICUS." Virginia, Nevada.&mdash;"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?"
+
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="poultry"></a>TO RAISE POULTRY</h2>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p081.jpg (131K)" src="images/p081.jpg" height="926" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<h3>[Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a
+complimentary membership upon the author.  Written about 1870.]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;especially in California and Oregon&mdash;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.&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p082.jpg (56K)" src="images/p082.jpg" height="891" width="365">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.]</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>vertu</i> 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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p084.jpg (27K)" src="images/p084.jpg" height="479" width="339">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="croup"></a>EXPERIENCE OF THE McWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP
+</h2>
+<h3>[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.]</h3>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p085.jpg (129K)" src="images/p085.jpg" height="881" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Darling, I wouldn't let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>I replied:</p>
+
+<p>"Love, it is notorious that pine is the least nutritious wood that a
+child can eat."</p>
+
+<p>My wife's hand paused, in the act of taking the stick, and returned
+itself to her lap.  She bridled perceptibly, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Who said the child's spine and kidneys were affected?"</p>
+
+<p>"My love, you intimated it."</p>
+
+<p>"The idea!  I never intimated anything of the kind."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, my dear, it hasn't been two minutes since you said&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, it shall be as you say.  But there is a want of logic in your
+last remark which&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mortimer, there's another!  Little Georgi Gordon is taken."</p>
+
+<p>"Membranous croup?"</p>
+
+<p>"Membranous croup."</p>
+
+<p>"Is there any hope for him?"</p>
+
+<p>"None in the wide world.  Oh, what is to become of us!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and she blanched again, poor thing.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p087.jpg (43K)" src="images/p087.jpg" height="497" width="401">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>We then restored the crib and the nurse to the nursery and put up a bed
+for ourselves in a room adjoining.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"What can make Baby sleep so?"</p>
+
+<p>I said:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, my darling, Baby always sleeps like a graven image."</p>
+
+<p>"I know.  I know; but there's something peculiar about his sleep now.
+He seems to&mdash;to&mdash;he seems to breathe so regularly.  Oh, this is
+dreadful."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear, he always breathes regularly."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"That is a good idea, but who will help you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can help me all I want.  I wouldn't allow anybody to do anything but
+myself, anyhow, at such a time as this."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Penelope coughed twice in her sleep.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, why don't that doctor come!  Mortimer, this room is too warm.  This
+room is certainly too warm.  Turn off the register-quick!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Mortimer!  Do you want to bring the judgment upon Baby, too!"</p>
+
+<p>Then she began to cry, but suddenly exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"The doctor must have sent medicines!"</p>
+
+<p>I said:</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly.  They are here.  I was only waiting for you to give me a
+chance."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>I said that while there was life there was hope.</p>
+
+<p>"Hope!  Mortimer, you know no more what you are talking about than the
+child unborn.  If you would&mdash;As I live, the directions say give one
+teaspoonful once an hour!  Once an hour!&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, my dear, a tablespoonful might&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't drive me frantic!  .  .  .  There, there, there, my precious, my
+own; it's nasty bitter stuff, but it's good for Nelly&mdash;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&mdash;oh,
+I know she can't live till morning!  Mortimer, a tablespoonful every
+half-hour will&mdash;Oh, the child needs belladonna, too; I know she does&mdash;and
+aconite.  Get them, Mortimer.  Now do let me have my way.  You know
+nothing about these things."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Darling, is that register turned on?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought as much.  Please turn it on at once.  This room is cold."</p>
+
+<p>I turned it on, and presently fell asleep again.  I was aroused once
+more:</p>
+
+<p>"Dearie, would you mind moving the crib to your side of the bed?  It is
+nearer the register."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Mortimer, if we only had some goose grease&mdash;will you ring?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Mortimer, why do you want to turn up the gas and wake up the child
+again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I want to see how much I am hurt, Caroline."</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p090.jpg (45K)" src="images/p090.jpg" height="495" width="399">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"Well, look at the chair, too&mdash;I have no doubt it is ruined.  Poor cat,
+suppose you had&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"On the mantelpiece in the nursery.  If you'll step there and speak to
+Maria&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I fetched the goose grease and went to sleep again.  Once more I was
+called:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>I dragged myself out and lit the fire, and then sat down disconsolate.</p>
+
+<p>"Mortimer, don't sit there and catch your death of cold.  Come to bed."</p>
+
+<p>As I was stepping in she said:</p>
+
+<p>"But wait a moment.  Please give the child some more of the medicine."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p091.jpg (41K)" src="images/p091.jpg" height="481" width="379">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"It is all over!  All over!  The child's perspiring!  What shall we do?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, idiot!  There is not a moment to lose!  Go for the doctor.
+Go yourself.  Tell him he must come, dead or alive."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<p>[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.]</p>
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="venture"></a>MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><h3>[written about 1865]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p094.jpg (64K)" src="images/p094.jpg" height="897" width="359">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the "Burial of
+Sir John Moore"&mdash;and a pretty crude parody it was, too.</p>
+
+<p>Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously&mdash;not because they
+had done anything to deserve, but merely because I thought it was my duty
+to make the paper lively.</p>
+
+<p>Next I gently touched up the newest stranger&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;l, he must select some other
+medium than the columns of this journal!"</p>
+
+<p>The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much
+attention as those playful trifles of mine.</p>
+
+<p>For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="newark"></a>HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1869]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p096.jpg (103K)" src="images/p096.jpg" height="892" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;never having seen any
+balm.) You may remember that I lectured in Newark lately for the young
+gentlemen of the&mdash;&mdash;-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.</p>
+
+<p>I said: "Bring him to my lecture.  I'll start him for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if you could but do it!  If you could but do it, all our family
+would bless you for evermore&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;with one wild burst of humor, and hurled a joke of
+supernatural atrocity full at him!</p>
+
+<p>Then I sat down bewildered and exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>I said: "I was trying to make that confounded old fool laugh, in the
+second row."</p>
+
+<p>And he said: "Well, you were wasting your time, because he is deaf and
+dumb, and as blind as a badger!"</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="bore"></a>THE OFFICE BORE</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1869]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p098.jpg (140K)" src="images/p098.jpg" height="896" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;for there are
+usually from two to four on hand, day and night&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="greer"></a>JOHNNY GREER
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>"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</p>
+
+<p>"'No; but did you, though?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Towed the carkiss ashore and saved it yo'self?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Cracky!  What did they give you?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Nothing.'</p>
+
+<p>"'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.'"</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="beef"></a>THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1867]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p101.jpg (106K)" src="images/p101.jpg" height="886" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>In as few words as possible I wish to lay before the nation what share,
+howsoever small, I have had in this matter&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The origin of this distressful thing was this&mdash;and I assert here that
+every fact in the following <i>résumé</i> can be amply proved by the official
+records of the General Government.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Very well.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p102.jpg (36K)" src="images/p102.jpg" height="431" width="333">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+     <h3>THE UNITED STATES</h3>
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+                  In account with JOHN WILSON MACKENZIE, of New Jersey,</td></tr><tr><td>
+               deceased, </td><td>      Dr.</td></tr><tr><td>
+&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+     To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </td><td>$3,000</td></tr><tr><td>
+     To traveling expenses and transportation </td><td>  14,000</td></tr><tr><td>
+&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+               Total </td><td>  $17,000</td></tr><tr><td>
+               Rec'd Pay't.</td></tr><tr><td>
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p103.jpg (35K)" src="images/p103.jpg" height="431" width="337">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>He said, "Well, sir, what can I do for you?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped me there, and dismissed me from his presence&mdash;kindly, but
+firmly.  The next day I called on the Secretary of State.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "Well, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That will do, sir&mdash;that will do; this office has nothing to do with
+contracts for beef."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I said, "Your Imperial Highness, on or about the 10th day of October&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I said, "Your August Excellency, on or about&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that is all very well&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear sir&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I said, "Most noble, grave, and reverend Signor, on or about the 10th day
+of October, 1861, John Wilson Macken&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That is sufficient, sir.  I have heard of you.  Go to the First Auditor
+of the Treasury."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>So I stood there till I had changed four different times.  Then I said to
+one of the clerks who was reading:</p>
+
+<p>"Illustrious Vagrant, where is the Grand Turk?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, sir? whom do you mean?  If you mean the Chief of the
+Bureau, he is out."</p>
+
+<p>"Will he visit the harem to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Renowned and honored Imbecile: on or about&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You are the beef-contract man.  Give me your papers."</p>
+
+<p>He took them, and for a long time he ransacked his odds and ends.
+Finally he found the Northwest Passage, as I regarded it&mdash;he found the
+long lost record of that beef contract&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is this John Wilson Mackenzie?"  said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Dead."</p>
+
+<p>"When did he die?"</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't die at all&mdash;he was killed."</p>
+
+<p>"How?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tomahawked."</p>
+
+<p>"Who tomahawked him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, an Indian, of course.  You didn't suppose it was the superintendent
+of a Sunday-school, did you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No.  An Indian, was it?"</p>
+
+<p>"The same."</p>
+
+<p>"Name of the Indian?"</p>
+
+<p>"His name?  I don't know his name."</p>
+
+<p>"Must have his name.  Who saw the tomahawking done?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"You were not present yourself, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Which you can see by my hair.  I was absent.</p>
+
+<p>"Then how do you know that Mackenzie is dead?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"We must have proofs.  Have you got the Indian?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you must get him.  Have you got the tomahawk?"</p>
+
+<p>"I never thought of such a thing."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't know anything about the genuineness of your claim."</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't the Second tell me? why didn't the Third? why didn't all
+those divisions and departments tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, certain death."  It has been, to the most of our tribe.  I begin to
+feel that I, too, am called.</p>
+
+<p>"Young man, you love the bright creature yonder with the gentle blue eyes
+and the steel pens behind her ears&mdash;I see it in your soft glances; you
+wish to marry her&mdash;but you are poor.  Here, hold out your hand&mdash;here is
+the beef contract; go, take her and be happy! Heaven bless you, my
+children!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="fisher"></a>THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p109.jpg (114K)" src="images/p109.jpg" height="889" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>&mdash;[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&mdash;a fact which was a long time
+in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent
+Congressional investigation.]
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the
+same amounting to $8,997.94.  Total, $17,870.94.</p>
+
+<p>3.  For an entire year the suffering Fisher family remained quiet&mdash;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&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>4.  Strange as it may seem, the Fishers let Congress alone for five
+years&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>5.  Therefore another interval of rest and silence ensued&mdsh;an interval
+which lasted four years&mdash;viz till 1858.  The "right man in the right
+place" was then Secretary of War&mdash;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&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;though not according to the Congress of 1832.]</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;which property consisted of (I
+quote from the printed United States Senate document):</p>
+
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+
+
+
+        &nbsp;                                    </td><td> Dollars</td></tr><tr><td>
+     Corn at Bassett's Creek,  </td><td>3,000</td></tr><tr><td>
+     Cattle,  </td><td>5,000</td></tr><tr><td>
+     Stock hogs,  </td><td>1,050</td></tr><tr><td>
+     Drove hogs,  </td><td>1,204</td></tr><tr><td>
+     Wheat,    </td><td>350</td></tr><tr><td>
+     Hides,  </td><td>4,000</td></tr><tr><td>
+     Corn on the Alabama River,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  </td><td>3,500</td></tr>
+ <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+              &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;           Total, </td><td>18,104</td></tr><tr><td>
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+<p>That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the "full value of the property
+destroyed by the troops."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p113.jpg (60K)" src="images/p113.jpg" height="471" width="589">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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):</p>
+
+<br><br>
+<h3>      The United States in account with the <br>legal representatives
+                      of George Fisher, deceased.</h3>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+1813&mdash;  </td><td>DOL</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 550 head of cattle, at 10 dollars,  </td><td>5,500</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 86 head of drove hogs,  </td><td>1,204</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 350 head of stock hogs,  </td><td>1,750</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT'S CREEK,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  </td><td>6,000</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 8 barrels of whisky,    </td><td>350</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 2 barrels of brandy,    </td><td>280</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 1 barrel of rum,     </td><td>70</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To dry-goods and merchandise in store,  </td><td>1,100</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 35 acres of wheat,    </td><td>350</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 2,000 hides,  </td><td>4,000</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To furs and hats in store,    </td><td>600</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To crockery ware in store,    </td><td>100</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To smith's and carpenter's tools,   </td><td> 250</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To houses burned and destroyed,    </td><td>600</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 4 dozen bottles of wine,     </td><td>48</td></tr><tr><td>
+			 &nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+1814&mdash;</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To 120 acres of corn on Alabama River,  </td><td>9,500</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To crops of peas, fodder, etc  </td><td>3,250</td></tr><tr><td>
+ &nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+         &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Total, </td><td>34,952</td></tr><tr><td>
+ &nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To interest on $22,202, from July 1813</td></tr><tr><td>
+          to November 1860, 47 years and 4 months, </td><td>63,053.68</td></tr><tr><td>
+ &nbsp;					</td></tr><tr><td>
+       To interest on $12,750, from September</td></tr><tr><td>
+          1814 to November 1860, 46 years and 2 months, </td><td>35,317.50</td></tr><tr><td>
+&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;                   Total,  </td><td>133,323.18</td></tr><tr><td>
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="" cellPadding=4 border=3>
+<tr><td>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p1.htm">Previous Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
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+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p3.htm">Next Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+
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+</table>
+</center>
+
+
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+
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+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p2.htm">Previous Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="3189-h.htm">Main Index</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p4.htm">Next Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ 
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Part 3.</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS:</h2>
+
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+
+<a href="#persecution">DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY</a><br><br>
+<a href="#spirited">THE JUDGES "SPIRITED WOMAN"</a><br><br>
+<a href="#information">INFORMATION WANTED</a><br><br>
+<a href="#oldboys">SOME LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#senatorial">MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP</a><br><br>
+<a href="#fashion">A FASHION ITEM</a><br><br>
+<a href="#riley">RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT</a><br><br>
+<a href="#oldman">A FINE OLD MAN</a><br><br>
+<a href="#science">SCIENCE vs. LUCK</a><br><br>
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="persecution"></a>DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;let us hear the
+testimony for the defense.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;probably because
+the degraded Mongol is at no expense for whisky, and the refined Celt
+cannot exist without it.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this way that he found out that a respectable number of the
+tax-gatherers&mdash;it would be unkind to say all of them&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, there goes a Chinaman!  God will not love me if I do not stone him."</p>
+
+<p>And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;[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.]</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="spirited"></a>THE JUDGE'S "SPIRITED WOMAN"
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p121.jpg (64K)" src="images/p121.jpg" height="399" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;Not Guilty&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"'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?'</p>
+
+<p>"'The same,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"That was spirited, I am willing to admit."</p>
+
+<p>"Wasn't it, though?" said the judge admiringly.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="information"></a>INFORMATION WANTED
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p123.jpg (136K)" src="images/p123.jpg" height="873" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"WASHINGTON, December 10, 1867.</p>
+
+<p>"Could you give me any information respecting such islands, if any, as
+the government is going to purchase?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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?</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="oldboys"></a>SOME LEARNED FABLES,
+<br>FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS
+<br>IN THREE PARTS
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p126.jpg (111K)" src="images/p126.jpg" height="860" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><h3>PART FIRST
+<br>
+<br>HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD SENT OUT A SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"You are hired to dig, sir&mdash;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&mdash;loafing about here
+meddling with august matters of learning, when the other laborers are
+pitching camp.  Go along and help handle the baggage."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>Professor Bull Frog (nephew of the late explorer) said he believed the
+ridge was the wall that inclosed the earth.  He continued:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Professor Snail adjusted his field-glass and examined the rampart
+critically.  Finally he said:</p>
+
+<p>"'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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Profound mind!" said Professor Angle-Worm to Professor Field-Mouse;
+"profound mind! nothing can long remain a mystery to that august brain."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"'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!"</p>
+
+<p>Every heart and every head was bowed, so awful, so sublime was the
+magnitude of the discovery.  Many shed tears.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p129.jpg (36K)" src="images/p129.jpg" height="489" width="389">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Give thanks for this stupendous thing which we have been permitted to
+witness.  It is the Vernal Equinox!"</p>
+
+<p>There were shoutings and great rejoicings.</p>
+
+<p>"But," said the Angle-Worm, uncoiling after reflection, "this is dead
+summer-time."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," said the Turtle, "we are far from our region; the season
+differs with the difference of time between the two points."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, true.  True enough.  But it is night.  How should the sun pass in
+the night?"</p>
+
+<p>"In these distant regions he doubtless passes always in the night at this
+hour."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, doubtless that is true.  But it being night, how is it that we
+could see him?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>This was deemed satisfactory, and due entry was made of the decision.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Deliver your opinions, brethren, and then I will tell my thought&mdash;for I
+think I have solved this problem."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>Further discussion followed, and then the united voice of the commission
+begged Lord Longlegs to speak.  He said:</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"But how is this?  Venus should traverse the sun's surface, not the
+earth's."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"My friend has touched the marrow of our mighty discovery.  Yes&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>The assembled wisdom sat in speechless adoration of this imperial
+intellect.  All doubts had instantly departed, like night before the
+lightning.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"No more of this, sirrah Tumble-Bug!  Say your say and then get you about
+your business with speed!  Quick&mdash;what is your errand?  Come move off a
+trifle; you smell like a stable; what have you been at?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;beg pardon, your honors, what was that th('ic!) thing that ripped
+by here first?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was the Vernal Equinox."</p>
+
+<p>"Inf('ic!)fernal equinox.  'At's all right.  D('ic !) Dunno him.  What's
+other one?"</p>
+
+<p>"The transit of Venus.</p>
+
+<p>"G('ic !) Got me again.  No matter.  Las' one dropped something."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, indeed!  Good luck!  Good news!  Quick what is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"M('ic!) Mosey out 'n' see.  It'll pay."</p>
+
+<p>No more votes were taken for four-and-twenty hours.  Then the following
+entry was made:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p133.jpg (37K)" src="images/p133.jpg" height="487" width="391">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p135.jpg (29K)" src="images/p135.jpg" height="489" width="405">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;which he did, furnishing the addition Anthem
+Singer, done into the Mastodon tongue.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"And improved it, mayhap," muttered the Tumble-Bug, who was intruding
+again, according to his idle custom and his unappeasable curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>END OF PART FIRST</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+<center><h3>SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS
+
+<br>PART SECOND
+
+<br>HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD COMPLETED THEIR SCIENTIFIC LABORS</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, take a walk!" said the chief of the expedition, with derision.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p139.jpg (40K)" src="images/p139.jpg" height="485" width="397">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+     THE AMERICAN HOTEL.    </td><td>  MEALS AT ALL HOURS.</td></tr><tr><td>
+     THE SHADES.            </td><td>  NO SMOKING.</td></tr><tr><td>
+     BOATS FOR HIRE CHEAP   </td><td>  UNION PRAYER MEETING, 4 P.M.</td></tr><tr><td>
+     BILLIARDS.              </td><td> THE WATERSIDE JOURNAL.</td></tr><tr><td>
+     THE A1 BARBER SHOP.     </td><td> TELEGRAPH OFFICE.</td></tr><tr><td>
+     KEEP OFF THE GRASS.     </td><td> TRY BRANDRETH'S PILLS.</td></tr><tr><td>
+     COTTAGES FOR RENT DURING </td><td>THE WATERING SEASON.</td></tr><tr><td>
+     FOR SALE CHEAP.          </td><td>FOR SALE CHEAP.</td></tr><tr><td>
+     FOR SALE CHEAP.          </td><td>FOR SALE CHEAP.</td></tr><tr><td>
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p140.jpg (26K)" src="images/p140.jpg" height="227" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>He observed that certain inscriptions were met with in greater frequency
+than others.  Such as "FOR SALE CHEAP"; "BILLIARDS"; "S. T.&mdash;1860&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Finally a cavern was discovered with these inscriptions upon it:</p>
+
+
+<center><b>
+                           <big>WATERSIDE MUSEUM.</big><br>
+                           Open at All Hours.<br>
+                          Admission 50 cents.<br>
+                        <big>WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF<br>
+                      WAX-WORKS, ANCIENT FOSSILS,<br>
+                                  ETC.</big><br>
+</b></center>
+
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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:</p>
+
+<p>"'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&mdash;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.'</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;and
+even in its legs.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p142.jpg (40K)" src="images/p142.jpg" height="503" width="395">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"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:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br> "'Jones, if you don't want to be discharged from the Musseum, make
+     the next primeaveal weppons more careful&mdash;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.&mdash;Varnum, Manager.'
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>"Back of the burial place was a mass of ashes, showing that Man always
+had a feast at a funeral&mdash;else why the ashes in such a place; and
+showing, also, that he believed in God and the immortality of the soul
+&mdash;else why these solemn ceremonies?</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>END OF PART SECOND</p>
+<br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><h3>SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS
+</h3></center>
+
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p144.jpg (37K)" src="images/p144.jpg" height="609" width="579">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+<center><h3>PART THIRD</h3></center>
+
+<p>Near the margin of the great river the scientists presently found a huge,
+shapely stone, with this inscription:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br> "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!"
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote><br>
+    "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."
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"True! true!" from everybody.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>A profound impression was produced by this.</p>
+
+<p>But it was interrupted by rude and derisive laughter&mdash;and the Tumble-Bug
+appeared.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p147.jpg (40K)" src="images/p147.jpg" height="489" width="389">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"In truth it is believed by many that the lower animals reason and talk
+together."</p>
+
+<p>When the great official report of the expedition appeared, the above
+sentence bore this comment:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="senatorial"></a>MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1867]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you were worthy of confidence."</p>
+
+<p>I said, "Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>I felt easier.  "Oh, if that is all, sir, I did do that."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you did.  I will read your answer for your own humiliation:</p>
+
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>                                        'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24
+<br><br>     'Messrs. Smith, Jones, and others.
+<br><br>
+     '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&mdash;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.
+<br><br>                    'Very truly, etc.,
+<br>                              Mark Twain,
+<br><br>                    'For James W. N&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, U. S. Senator.'
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, I did not know I was doing any harm.  I only wanted to
+convince them."</p>
+
+<p>"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?</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>                                        "'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24.
+
+<br><br>     "'Rev. John Halifax and others.
+
+<br><br>     "'GENTLEMEN: You will have to go to the state legislature about that
+     speculation of yours&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;you can't make it work.  You can't issue stock
+     on an incorporation like that&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;that is what I think about it.  You close your petition
+     with the words: "And we will ever pray."  I think you had better&mdash;you
+     need to do it.
+<br><br>                         "'Very truly, etc.,
+<br>                                   "'MARK TWAIN,
+<br><br>                         "'For James W. N&mdash;&mdash;-, U. S. Senator.'
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>
+"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&mdash;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&mdash;an ambiguous letter&mdash;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&mdash;any
+shame&mdash;surely this letter you wrote, in obedience to that order, ought to
+evoke it, when its words fall upon your ears:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>                                        'WASHINGTON, Nov. 27
+
+<br><br>     'The Honorable Board of Aldermen, etc.
+
+<br><br>     '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!
+
+<br><br>     'What is fame!  Fame is an accident.  Sir Isaac Newton discovered
+     an apple falling to the ground&mdash;a trivial discovery, truly, and one
+     which a million men had made before him&mdash;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.
+
+<br><br>     'Poesy, sweet poesy, who shall estimate what the world owes to
+     thee!
+
+<br><br>     "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as <br>
+             snow&mdash;And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go."<br>
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+		 <center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+<br>                    "Jack and Gill went up the hill
+<br>                    To draw a pail of water;
+<br>                    Jack fell down and broke his crown,
+<br>                    And Gill came tumbling after."
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+
+<br><br>     '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
+    &mdash;to the field, to the nursery, to the guild.  Especially should
+     no Board of Aldermen be without them.
+
+<br><br>     'Venerable fossils! write again.  Nothing improves one so much as
+     friendly correspondence.  Write again&mdash;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.
+<br><br>                         'Very truly, etc.,
+<br>                                   "'MARK TWAIN,
+<br><br>                         'For James W. N&mdash;&mdash;-, U. S. Senator.'
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>
+"That is an atrocious, a ruinous epistle!  Distraction!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, I am really sorry if there is anything wrong about
+it&mdash;but&mdash;but it appears to me to dodge the water-lot question."</p>
+
+<p>"Dodge the mischief!  Oh!&mdash;but never mind.  As long as destruction must
+come now, let it be complete.  Let it be complete&mdash;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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>
+                                        "'WASHINGTON, Nov. 30.
+
+<br><br>     "'Messers. Perkins, Wagner, et at.
+
+<br><br>     "'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.
+<br><br>                              "'Very truly, etc.,
+<br>                                        "'MARK TWAIN,
+<br><br>                              "'For James W. N&mdash;&mdash;-, U. S. Senator.'
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>
+"There&mdash;now what do you think of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know, sir.  It&mdash;well, it appears to me&mdash;to be dubious
+enough."</p>
+
+<p>"Du&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Leave the house!  Leave it forever and forever, too."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="fashion"></a>A FASHION ITEM</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1867]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p153.jpg (136K)" src="images/p153.jpg" height="873" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>At General G&mdash;&mdash;'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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="riley"></a>RILEY&mdash;NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p154.jpg (100K)" src="images/p154.jpg" height="917" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>One of the best men in Washington&mdash;or elsewhere&mdash;is RILEY, correspondent
+of one of the great San Francisco dailies.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And, sure enough, at breakfast the landlady was down in the very sloughs
+of woe&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, to think of it, only to think of it!&mdash;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!&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Put it, 'Well done, good and faithful servant,'" said Riley, and never
+smiled.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="oldman"></a>A FINE OLD MAN
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p158.jpg (97K)" src="images/p158.jpg" height="841" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>John Wagner, the oldest man in Buffalo&mdash;one hundred and four years
+old&mdash;recently walked a mile and a half in two weeks.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;which was a lie.</p>
+
+<p>His "second crop" of rich brown hair arrived from New York yesterday, and
+he has a new set of teeth coming from&mdash;Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>He is to be married next week to a girl one hundred and two years old,
+who still takes in washing.</p>
+
+<p>They have been engaged eighty years, but their parents persistently
+refused their consent until three days ago.</p>
+
+<p>John Wagner is two years older than the Rhode Island veteran, and yet has
+never tasted a drop of liquor in his life&mdash;unless&mdash;unless you count
+whisky.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="science"></a>SCIENCE V.S. LUCK</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1867]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p159.jpg (54K)" src="images/p159.jpg" height="389" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>At that time, in Kentucky (said the Hon. Mr. K&mdash;&mdash;-); 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;his clients could not be punished for
+indulging in what some people chose to consider a game of chance until it
+was <i>proven</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you call it now?" said the judge.</p>
+
+<p>"I call it a game of science!" retorted Sturgis; "and I'll prove it,
+too!"</p>
+
+<p>They saw his little game.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Sturgis was on his feet in a second.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of the story can be told briefly.  About daylight the jury came
+in, and Deacon Job, the foreman, read the following:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>     VERDICT:
+
+<br><br>
+     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.
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;&mdash;-.
+"That verdict is of record, and holds good to this day."</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+<center>
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+<tr><td>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p2.htm">Previous Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
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+</td><td>
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+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p3.htm">Previous Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="3189-h.htm">Main Index</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p5.htm">Next Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ 
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Part 4.</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS:</h2>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+<a href="#franklin">THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN</a><br><br>
+<a href="#bloke">MR. BLOKE'S ITEM</a><br><br>
+<a href="#medieval">A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE</a><br><br>
+<a href="#petition">PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT</a><br><br>
+<a href="#afterdinner">AFTER-DINNER SPEECH</a><br><br>
+<a href="#murderers">LIONIZING MURDERERS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#newcrime">A NEW CRIME</a><br><br>
+<a href="#dream">A CURIOUS DREAM</a><br><br>
+<a href="#truestory">A TRUE STORY</a><br><br>
+
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="franklin"></a>THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1870]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p275.jpg (93K)" src="images/p275.jpg" height="893" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just
+as well."&mdash;B. F.]</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p276.jpg (29K)" src="images/p276.jpg" height="445" width="355">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>Not satisfied
+with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and
+water, and studying astronomy at meal-time&mdash;a thing which has brought
+affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's
+pernicious biography.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;'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:</p>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+<br>               Early to bed and early to rise
+<br>               Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;as if it was any of his business.
+My grandfather knew him well, and he says Franklin was always
+fixed&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p278.jpg (24K)" src="images/p278.jpg" height="429" width="341">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p279.jpg (85K)" src="images/p279.jpg" height="880" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="p280.jpg (95K)" src="images/p280.jpg" height="837" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="p281.jpg (69K)" src="images/p281.jpg" height="965" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="p282.jpg (82K)" src="images/p282.jpg" height="799" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="bloke"></a>MR. BLOKE'S ITEM</h2></center>
+<br>
+<center><h3>[written about 1865]</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p167.jpg (130K)" src="images/p167.jpg" height="890" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>     DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.&mdash;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.&mdash;'First Edition of
+     the Californian.'
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I have read it again, and it does really seem a good deal more mixed than
+ever.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p169.jpg (60K)" src="images/p169.jpg" height="557" width="561">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="medieval"></a>A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE [written about 1868]
+</h2>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p171.jpg (95K)" src="images/p171.jpg" height="856" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><h3>CHAPTER I.
+<br><br>
+THE SECRET REVEALED.</h3></center>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"My daughter!"</p>
+
+<p>A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,
+answered:</p>
+
+<p>"Speak, father!"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"'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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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?&mdash;for, woman 
+of eight-and-twenty years&mdash;as
+you are, my child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;Duke in act, though not
+yet in name.  Your servitors are ready&mdash;you journey forth to-night.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Betake thee to the Duke, instantly!  And beware how thou meddlest with my
+purpose!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The old baron sat silent for many minutes after his daughter's departure,
+and then he turned to his sad wife and said:</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"My heart is full of bodings, yet all may still be well."</p>
+
+<p>"Tush, woman! Leave the owls to croak.  To bed with ye, and dream of
+Brandenburgh and grandeur!"</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER II.
+<br><br>
+FESTIVITY AND TEARS</h3></center>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"The villain Detzin is gone&mdash;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&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER III.
+<br><br>
+THE PLOT THICKENS</h3></center>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, why do you avoid me?  What have I done&mdash;what have I said, to lose
+your kind opinion of me&mdash;for surely I had it once?  Conrad, do not
+despise me, but pity a tortured heart?  I cannot,&mdash;cannot hold the words
+unspoken longer, lest they kill me&mdash;I LOVE YOU, CONRAD!  There, despise
+me if you must, but they would be uttered!"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"You relent! you relent! You can love me&mdash;you will love me! Oh, say you
+will, my own, my worshipped Conrad!"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>By and by Constance rose slowly to her feet and moved away, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;did this
+man&mdash;he spurned me from him like a dog!"</p>
+
+<br><br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER IV.
+<br><br>
+THE AWFUL REVELATION</h3></center>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"The Lady Constance hath given birth to a child!"</p>
+
+<p>When the lord of Klugenstein heard it, he swung his plumed helmet thrice
+around his head and shouted:</p>
+
+<p>"Long live Duke Conrad!&mdash;for lo, his crown is sure from this day
+forward!  Detzin has done his errand well, and the good scoundrel shall
+be rewarded!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER V.
+<br><br>
+THE FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE</h3></center>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The saddest heart in all that great assemblage was in Conrad's breast.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>After the heralds had made due proclamation and the other preliminaries
+had followed, the venerable Lord Chief justice said:</p>
+
+<p>"Prisoner, stand forth!"</p>
+
+<p>The unhappy princess rose, and stood unveiled before the vast multitude.
+The Lord Chief Justice continued:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Not there, your Grace, not there!  It is not lawful to pronounce
+judgment upon any of the ducal line SAVE FROM THE DUCAL THRONE!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;save yourself while yet
+you may.  Name the father of your child!"</p>
+
+<p>A solemn hush fell upon the great court&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"Thou art the man!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p178.jpg (128K)" src="images/p178.jpg" height="576" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole
+business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers&mdash;or
+else stay there.  I thought it was going to be easy enough to straighten
+out that little difficulty, but it looks different now.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="petition"></a>PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>TO THE HONORABLE THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
+IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><b>Whereas</b>, The Constitution guarantees equal rights to all, backed by the
+Declaration of Independence; and</p>
+
+<p><b>Whereas</b>, Under our laws, the right of property in real estate is
+perpetual; and</p>
+
+<p><b>Whereas</b>, Under our laws, the right of property in the literary result of
+a citizen's intellectual labor is restricted to forty-two years; and</p>
+
+<p><b>Whereas</b>, Forty-two years seems an exceedingly just and righteous term,
+and a sufficiently long one for the retention of property;</p>
+
+<p><b>Therefore</b>, 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.
+<br><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+MARK TWAIN.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<br><br><br>
+<center><h3>A PARAGRAPH NOT ADDED TO THE PETITION</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="afterdinner"></a>AFTER-DINNER SPEECH
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[AT A FOURTH OF JULY GATHERING, IN LONDON, OF AMERICANS]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;common drinks, what is longer needful
+to the cementing of the two nations together in a permanent bond of
+brotherhood?</p>
+
+<p>This is an age of progress, and ours is a progressive land.  A great and
+glorious land, too&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;and return the basket."  Now there couldn't be anything
+friendlier than that.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>     [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!"]</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="murderers"></a>LIONIZING MURDERERS
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p182.jpg (135K)" src="images/p182.jpg" height="880" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>I had heard so much about the celebrated fortune-teller Madame&mdash;
+&mdash;, 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&mdash;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&mdash;I knew
+that as soon as she sighed.  She looked at me searchingly for nearly a
+minute, with her black eyes, and then said:</p>
+
+<p>"It is enough.  Come!"</p>
+
+<p>She started down a very dark and dismal corridor&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"It is not worth while, madam.  If you will heave another sigh, I think I
+can follow it."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Young man, summon your fortitude&mdash;do not tremble.  I am about to reveal
+the past."</p>
+
+<p>"Information concerning the future would be, in a general way, more&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Silence!  You have had much trouble, some joy, some good fortune, some
+bad.  Your great grandfather was hanged."</p>
+
+<p>"That is a l&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Silence!  Hanged sir.  But it was not his fault.  He could not help it."</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad you do him justice."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"In view of this cheerful&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;all will be well&mdash;you
+will be hanged."</p>
+
+<p>I was now in tears.  It seemed hard enough to go to Congress; but to be
+hanged&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, man," she said, "hold up your head&mdash;you have nothing to grieve
+about.  Listen.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;[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&mdash;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.&mdash;"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."]</p>
+
+<p>"You will live in New Hampshire.  In your sharp need and distress the
+Brown family will succor you&mdash;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&mdash;you will be converted just as soon as
+every effort to compass pardon, commutation, or reprieve has failed&mdash;and
+then!&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;will weep over your remains&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p185.jpg (65K)" src="images/p185.jpg" height="438" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a bewept, bewailed, and sainted martyr&mdash;all in a month!
+Fool!&mdash;so noble a fortune, and yet you sit here grieving!"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;you
+would not deceive a stranger.  But let the past be as it was, and let the
+future be as it may&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a shadow of a doubt!"</p>
+
+<p>"Bless you, my benefactress!&mdash;excuse this embrace&mdash;you have removed a
+great load from my breast.  To be hanged in New Hampshire is
+happiness&mdash;it leaves an honored name behind a man, and introduces him at once into
+the best New Hampshire society in the other world."</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="newcrime"></a>A NEW CRIME
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>LEGISLATION NEEDED
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p187.jpg (139K)" src="images/p187.jpg" height="856" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world, and crime is dying
+out.  There are no longer any murders&mdash;none worth mentioning, at any
+rate.  Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were
+insane&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against
+insanity.  There is where the true evil lies.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="dream"></a>A CURIOUS DREAM [Written about 1870.]
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>CONTAINING A MORAL
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p192.jpg (99K)" src="images/p192.jpg" height="638" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Ease this down for a fellow, will you?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;chiefly from former habit
+I judged, for I could not see that he brought away any perspiration.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"What is too bad, friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, everything, everything.  I almost wish I never had died."</p>
+
+<p>"You surprise me.  Why do you say this?  Has anything gone wrong?  What
+is the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Calm yourself, calm yourself," I said.  "It is too bad&mdash;it is certainly
+too bad, but then I had not supposed that you would much mind such
+matters, situated as you are."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear sir, I do mind them.  My pride is hurt, and my comfort is
+impaired&mdash;destroyed, I might say.  I will state my case&mdash;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&mdash;so to speak&mdash;and in prominent contrast with his
+distressful mood.</p>
+
+<p>"Proceed," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here,
+in this street&mdash;there, now, I just expected that cartilage would let
+go!&mdash;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&mdash;to think of shredding out and going to pieces in this way, just
+on account of the indifference and neglect of one's posterity!"&mdash;and the
+poor ghost grated his teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a
+shiver&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there, and was happy.  For it
+was out in the country then&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p195.jpg (45K)" src="images/p195.jpg" height="266" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"You begin to comprehend&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;think a party by the name of Smith
+took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder&mdash;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&mdash;and it
+is a significant fact that he left when he saw me; and presently an old
+woman from here missed her coffin&mdash;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&mdash;Anna Matilda Hotchkiss&mdash;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&mdash;lost
+in a fight&mdash;has a kind of swagger in her gait and a 'gallus' way of going
+with her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the air&mdash;has been pretty free
+and easy, and is all damaged and battered up till she looks like a
+queensware crate in ruins&mdash;maybe you have met her?"</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p197.jpg (25K)" src="images/p197.jpg" height="503" width="382">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a
+friend of yours.  You were saying that you were robbed&mdash;and it was a
+shame, too&mdash;but it appears by what is left of the shroud you have on that
+it was a costly one in its day.  How did&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, friend," said the poor skeleton, "the facts are just as I have
+given them to you.  Two of these old graveyards&mdash;the one that I resided
+in and one further along&mdash;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&mdash;and that is no light matter this
+rainy weather&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and all the more that
+there isn't a compliment on it.  It used to have:</p>
+
+<center>                    <h3>'GONE TO HIS JUST REWARD'</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>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&mdash;died in
+'44&mdash;belongs to our set in the cemetery&mdash;fine old family&mdash;
+great-grandmother
+was an Injun&mdash;I am on the most familiar terms with him&mdash;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&mdash;shroud cost four hundred dollars&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;no, don't mention it&mdash;
+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&mdash;No?  Well, just as you
+say, but I wished to be fair and liberal&mdash;there's nothing mean about me.
+Good-by, friend, I must be going.  I may have a good way to go
+to-night&mdash;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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a position
+favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.</p>
+
+<p>NOTE.&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p201.jpg (23K)" src="images/p201.jpg" height="321" width="587">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="truestory"></a>A TRUE STORY
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>REPEATED WORD FOR WORD AS I HEARD IT&mdash;[Written about 1876]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p202.jpg (118K)" src="images/p202.jpg" height="908" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Rachel, how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any
+trouble?"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Misto C&mdash;&mdash;, is you in 'arnest?"</p>
+
+<p>It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner and my speech, too.
+I said:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I thought&mdash;that is, I meant&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>She faced fairly around now, and was full earnestness.</p>
+
+<p>"Has I had any trouble? Misto C&mdash;&mdash;-, 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&mdash;dat's my
+husban'&mdash;he was lovin' an' kind to me, jist as kind as you is to yo' own
+wife.  An' we had chil'en&mdash;seven chil'en&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Rachel had gradually risen, while she warmed to her subject, and now
+she towered above us, black against the stars.</p>
+
+<p>"Dey put chains on us an' put us on a stan' as high as dis po'ch&mdash;twenty
+foot high&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, dah was my ole man gone, an' all my chil'en, all my seven
+chil'en&mdash;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.'</p>
+
+<p>"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.'</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;he's a man!'</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>nuffin</i> 'bout dis.  How was <i>I</i> gwyne to know it?</p>
+
+<p>"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!</p>
+
+<p>"Well, one night&mdash;it was a Friday night&mdash;dey comes a whole platoon f'm a
+nigger ridgment da was on guard at de house&mdash;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!&mdash;rubbage!'</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p206.jpg (32K)" src="images/p206.jpg" height="427" width="337">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;jist as I is now, plum to de ceilin',
+mos'&mdash;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!'&mdash;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&mdash;so, lookin' like a gen'l&mdash;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.'</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;jist so, same as if yo' foot was de stove&mdash;an' I'd opened de stove
+do' wid my right han'&mdash;so, pushin' it back, jist as I pushes yo'
+foot&mdash;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&mdash;jist so, as I's
+doin' to you&mdash;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!'</p>
+
+<p>     "Oh no' Misto C&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, I hain't had no trouble.  An' no joy!"</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p207.jpg (12K)" src="images/p207.jpg" height="393" width="361">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<br><br>
+
+
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+ 
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Part 5.</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS:</h2>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+
+<a href="#twins">THE SIAMESE TWINS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#scottish">SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON</a><br><br>
+<a href="#ghost">A GHOST STORY</a><br><br>
+<a href="#venus">THE CAPITOLINE VENUS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#insurance">SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE</a><br><br>
+<a href="#chinaman">JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK</a><br><br>
+<a href="#agricultural">HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER</a><br><br>
+<a href="#petrified">THE PETRIFIED MAN</a><br><br>
+<a href="#massacre">MY BLOODY MASSACRE</a><br><br>
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="twins"></a>THE SIAMESE TWINS
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1868.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p208.jpg (88K)" src="images/p208.jpg" height="602" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;the just reward
+of faithfulness.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>There is a moral in these solemn warnings&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I could say more of an instructive nature about these interesting beings,
+but let what I have written suffice.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p212.jpg (13K)" src="images/p212.jpg" height="321" width="291">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="scottish"></a>SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1872.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;of the army, of the navy, of even royalty
+itself&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>                         "Woman!  O woman!&mdash;er&mdash;
+                         Wom&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>[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&mdash;so wild, so regretful,
+so full of mournful retrospection.  The lines run thus:</p>
+
+<p>                    "Alas!&mdash;alas!&mdash;a&mdash;alas!
+                    &mdash;&mdash;Alas!&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;alas!"</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;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&mdash;[laughter]&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And, not because she conquered George III.&mdash;[laughter]&mdash;but because she
+wrote those divine lines:</p>
+
+<p>                    "Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
+                    For God hath made them so."</p>
+
+<p>[More laughter.]  The story of the world is adorned with the names of
+illustrious ones of our own sex&mdash;some of them sons of St.  Andrew,
+too&mdash;Scott, Bruce, Burns, the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis&mdash;[laughter]&mdash;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&mdash;the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Semiramis, Sairey
+Gamp; the list is endless&mdash;[laughter]&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.]</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>&mdash;[* 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.]</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="ghost"></a>A GHOST STORY
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p215.jpg (117K)" src="images/p215.jpg" height="881" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;the step of
+an elephant, it seemed to me&mdash;it was not like anything human.  But it was
+moving from me&mdash;there was relief in that.  I heard it approach the
+door&mdash;pass out without moving bolt or lock&mdash;and wander away among the dismal
+corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it
+passed&mdash;and then silence reigned once more.</p>
+
+<p>When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself, "This is a dream&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear.  I lay a long
+time, peering into the darkness, and listening.&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;it seemed to pass to the
+door and go out.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>All my misery vanished&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;Here, here, don't try to sit down in that thing&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But it was too late.  He was in it before I could stop him and down he
+went&mdash;I never saw a chair shivered so in my life.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop, stop, you'll ruin ev&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Too late again.  There was another crash, and another chair was resolved
+into its original elements.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But it was no use.  Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed,
+and it was a melancholy ruin.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;you are big enough to know better."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;nothing
+else can stand your weight&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p219.jpg (32K)" src="images/p219.jpg" height="435" width="345">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your
+legs, that they are gouged up so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Infernal chilblains&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked
+tired, and spoke of it.</p>
+
+<p>"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!&mdash;
+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&mdash;entirely fagged out.  Give me, I beseech you, give me some
+hope!"</p>
+<p>
+I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:</p>
+</p>
+<p>"This transcends everything!  everything that ever did occur!  Why you
+poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for
+nothing&mdash;you have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself&mdash;the real Cardiff Giant
+is in Albany!&mdash;[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,]&mdash;Confound it, don't you know your own remains?"</p>
+
+<p>I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation,
+overspread a countenance before.</p>
+
+<p>The Petrified Man rose slowly to his feet, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Honestly, is that true?"</p>
+
+<p>"As true as I am sitting here."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and sorrier still that he had carried off my red blanket and my bath-tub.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="venus"></a>THE CAPITOLINE VENUS
+</h2></center>
+
+<br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER I.
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p222.jpg (121K)" src="images/p222.jpg" height="887" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>[Scene-An Artist's Studio in Rome.]</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, George, I do love you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Bless your dear heart, Mary, I know that&mdash;why is your father so
+obdurate?"</p>
+
+<p>"George, he means well, but art is folly to him&mdash;he only understands
+groceries.  He thinks you would starve me."</p>
+
+<p>"Confound his wisdom&mdash;it savors of inspiration.  Why am I not a
+money-making bowelless grocer, instead of a divinely gifted sculptor with
+nothing to eat?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do not despond, Georgy, dear&mdash;all his prejudices will fade away as soon
+as you shall have acquired fifty thousand dol&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Fifty thousand demons!  Child, I am in arrears for my board!"</p>
+
+
+<br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER II.</h3>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<p>[Scene-A Dwelling in Rome.]</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;I
+believe you have nothing else to offer."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Bosh!  What does that Arkansas ass know about it?  Fame's nothing&mdash;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&mdash;otherwise she marries young Simper.  You have just six months to raise
+the money in.  Good morning, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Alas!  Woe is me!"</p>
+
+<br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER III.</h3>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<p>[ Scene-The Studio.]</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, John, friend of my boyhood, I am the unhappiest of men."</p>
+
+<p>"You're a simpleton!"</p>
+
+<p>"I have nothing left to love but my poor statue of America&mdash;and see, even
+she has no sympathy for me in her cold marble countenance&mdash;so beautiful
+and so heartless!"</p>
+
+<p>"You're a dummy!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, John!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, fudge!  Didn't you say you had six months to raise the money in?"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Idiot!  Coward!  Baby!  Six months to raise the money in&mdash;and five will
+do!"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you insane?"</p>
+
+<p>"Six months&mdash;an abundance.  Leave it to me.  I'll raise it."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, John?  How on earth can you raise such a monstrous sum
+for me?"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am dizzy&mdash;bewildered&mdash;but I swear."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;another, and
+part of an ear came away&mdash;another, and a row of toes was mangled and
+dismembered&mdash;another, and the left leg, from the knee down, lay a
+fragmentary ruin!</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p224.jpg (40K)" src="images/p224.jpg" height="445" width="495">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>John put on his hat and departed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>John returned presently with a carriage, got the broken-hearted artist
+and the broken-legged statue aboard, and drove off, whistling low and
+tranquilly.</p>
+
+<p>He left the artist at his lodgings, and drove off and disappeared down
+the Via Quirinalis with the statue.</p>
+
+<br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER IV.</h3>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<p>[Scene&mdash;The Studio.]</p>
+
+<p>"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? &mdash;don't mention it!  My bootmaker duns me to death&mdash;my tailor
+duns me&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, happiness attend your highness&mdash;Heaven be propitious to your grace!
+I have brought my lord's new boots&mdash;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&mdash;ah, adieu!"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;come in!"</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon, signore, but I have brought your new suit of clothes for&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Come in!"</p>
+
+<p>"A thousand pardons for this intrusion, your worship.  But I have
+prepared the beautiful suite of rooms below for you&mdash;this wretched den is
+but ill suited to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Come in!"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"COME IN!"</p>
+
+<p>"My noble boy, she is yours!  She'll be here in a moment!  Take
+her&mdash;marry her&mdash;love her&mdash;be happy!&mdash;God bless you both!  Hip, hip, hur&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"COME IN!!!!!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, George, my own darling, we are saved!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mary, my own darling, we are saved&mdash;but I'll swear I don't know why
+nor how!"</p>
+
+<br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER V.</h3>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<p>[Scene-A Roman Cafe.]</p>
+
+<p>One of a group of American gentlemen reads and translates from the weekly
+edition of 'Il Slangwhanger di Roma' as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>WONDERFUL DISCOVERY&mdash;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.
+
+<br><br>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!
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>Chorus of Voices.&mdash;"Luck!  It's no name for it!"</p>
+
+<p>Another Voice.&mdash;"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."</p>
+
+<p>All.&mdash;"Agreed."</p>
+
+<br><br>
+<center><h3>CHAPTER VI.</h3>
+</center>
+<br>
+
+<p>[Scene&mdash;The Roman Capitol Ten Years Later.]</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p227.jpg (72K)" src="images/p227.jpg" height="482" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"The worshiped, the illustrious Capitoline Venus&mdash;and what a sum she is
+valued at!  Ten millions of francs!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;now she is."</p>
+
+<p>"And oh, Georgy, how divinely beautiful she is!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes but nothing to what she was before that blessed John Smith broke
+her leg and battered her nose.  Ingenious Smith!&mdash;gifted Smith!&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>THE END</p>
+<br>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<p>
+[NOTE.&mdash;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]</p>
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="insurance"></a>SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>DELIVERED IN HARTFORD, AT A DINNER TO CORNELIUS WALFORD, OF LONDON
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>GENTLEMEN: I am glad, indeed, to assist in welcoming the distinguished
+guest of this occasion to a city whose fame as an insurance center has
+extended to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple band of
+brothers working sweetly hand in hand&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance
+line of business&mdash;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&mdash;as an
+advertisement.  I do not seem to care for poetry any more.  I do not care
+for politics&mdash;even agriculture does not excite me.  But to me now there
+is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I will remark here, by way of advertisement, that that noble charity
+which we have named the HARTFORD ACCIDENT INSURANCE COMPANY&mdash;[The
+speaker is a director of the company named.]&mdash;is an institution which is
+peculiarly to be depended upon.  A man is bound to prosper who gives it
+his custom.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;has a good steady income and a stylish suit of new bandages
+every day, and travels around on a shutter.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="chinaman"></a>JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p231.jpg (145K)" src="images/p231.jpg" height="895" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Cheer up&mdash;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&mdash;you shall go back to China&mdash;you shall
+see your friends again.  What wages do they pay you here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Divil a cint but four dollars a week and find meself; but it's aisy,
+barrin' the troublesome furrin clothes that's so expinsive."</p>
+
+<p>The exile remains at his post.  The New York tea merchants who need
+picturesque signs are not likely to run out of Chinamen.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="agricultural"></a>HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1870.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p233.jpg (115K)" src="images/p233.jpg" height="637" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He put the paper on his lap, and while he polished his spectacles with
+his handkerchief he said, "Are you the new editor?"</p>
+
+<p>I said I was.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever edited an agricultural paper before?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said; "this is my first attempt."</p>
+
+<p>"Very likely.  Have you had any experience in agriculture practically?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I believe I have not."</p>
+
+<p>"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:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+    "'Turnips should never be pulled, it injures them.  It is much
+     better to send a boy up and let him shake the tree.'
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>"Now, what do you think of that?&mdash;for I really suppose you wrote it?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Shake your grandmother!  Turnips don't grow on trees!"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"There, you wrote that.  Read it to me&mdash;quick!  Relieve me.  I suffer."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+<p>
+     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.
+
+  <p>   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.
+
+     <p>Now, as the warm weather approaches, and the ganders begin to
+     spawn&mdash;
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>
+The excited listener sprang toward me to shake hands, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"There, there&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p236.jpg (73K)" src="images/p236.jpg" height="889" width="371">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.]</p>
+
+<p>The editor was looking sad and perplexed and dejected.</p>
+
+<p>He surveyed the wreck which that old rioter and those two young farmers
+had made, and then said "This is a sad business&mdash;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&mdash;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;&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>I then left.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="petrified"></a>THE PETRIFIED MAN
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p239.jpg (125K)" src="images/p239.jpg" height="865" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.&mdash;&mdash;, 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 &mdash;&mdash; 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.&mdash;&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p240.jpg (28K)" src="images/p240.jpg" height="441" width="347">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;&mdash;, "with that delicacy so characteristic of
+him, forbade them, observing that it would be little less than sacrilege
+to do such a thing."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;&mdash;'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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;&mdash;-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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p242.jpg (30K)" src="images/p242.jpg" height="431" width="341">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="massacre"></a>MY BLOODY MASSACRE
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p243.jpg (123K)" src="images/p243.jpg" height="886" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p245.jpg (27K)" src="images/p245.jpg" height="435" width="345">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"Jim, he b'iled his baby, and he took the old 'oman's skelp.  Cuss'd if I
+want any breakfast!"</p>
+
+<p>And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend
+departed from the restaurant empty but satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
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+
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Part 6.</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS:</h2>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+<a href="#undertaker">THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT</a><br><br>
+<a href="#chambermaids">CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#aurelia">AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN</a><br><br>
+<a href="#jenkins">"AFTER" JENKINS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#barbers">ABOUT BARBERS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#ireland">"PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND</a><br><br>
+<a href="#resignation">THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION</a><br><br>
+<a href="#history">HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF</a><br><br>
+<a href="#curiosity">HONORED AS A CURIOSITY</a><br><br>
+
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="undertaker"></a>THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+
+<p>"Now that corpse," said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of
+deceased approvingly, "was a brick&mdash;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&mdash;nothing else would do.
+I couldn't get it.  There warn't going to be time&mdash;anybody could see
+that.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;and so
+ca'm and so cool.  Jist a hunk of brains&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;didn't want any procession&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"I never see a man snuffed out so sudden.  Ah, it was a great loss&mdash;a
+powerful loss to this poor little one-horse town.  Well, well, well, I
+hain't got time to be palavering along here&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;you hear me!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="chambermaids"></a>CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p250.jpg (92K)" src="images/p250.jpg" height="617" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>Against all chambermaids, of whatsoever age or nationality, I launch the
+curse of bachelordom!  Because:</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If they cannot get the light in an inconvenient position any other way,
+they move the bed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If you want the spittoon in a certain spot, where it will be handy, they
+don't, and so they move it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They do all the mean things they can think of, and they do them just out
+of pure cussedness, and nothing else.</p>
+
+<p>Chambermaids are dead to every human instinct.</p>
+
+<p>If I can get a bill through the legislature abolishing chambermaids, I
+mean to do it.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="aurelia"></a>AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1865.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p253.jpg (89K)" src="images/p253.jpg" height="613" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>So she extended the time once more, and he broke his other leg.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;she
+still loves what is left of him&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="jenkins"></a>"AFTER" JENKINS
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<p>A grand affair of a ball&mdash;the Pioneers'&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="barbers"></a>ABOUT BARBERS
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p257.jpg (140K)" src="images/p257.jpg" height="853" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p259.jpg (23K)" src="images/p259.jpg" height="455" width="405">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>At last my turn came.  A voice said "Next!" and I surrendered to&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p260.jpg (37K)" src="images/p260.jpg" height="483" width="379">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later.  I am waiting
+over a day for my revenge&mdash;I am going to attend his funeral.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="ireland"></a>"PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p262.jpg (132K)" src="images/p262.jpg" height="886" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;informers get half.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"To hell with!"</p>
+
+<p>"To hell with who?  To hell with what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, bedad, ye can finish it yourself&mdash;it's too expinsive for me!"</p>
+
+<p>I think the seditious disposition, restrained by the economical instinct,
+is finely put in that.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="resignation"></a>THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION [Written about 1867]
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>WASHINGTON, December, 1867.
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;pleasure excursions that are in reason&mdash;pleasure excursions
+that are economical.  Now, they might go down the Mississippi
+on a raft&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"What will you have?"</p>
+
+<p>The question threw me off my guard.  I said, "Rum punch."</p>
+
+<p>He said: "If you have got any business here, sir, state it&mdash;and in as few
+words as possible."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;no heroes, no plot, no pictures&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, who are you?"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"This is the meddlesome ass that came to recommend me to put poetry and
+conundrums in my report, as if it were an almanac."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>The President said it was.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you been all day?"</p>
+
+<p>I observed that, if that was anybody's affair but my own, I had been to a
+Cabinet meeting.</p>
+
+<p>"To a Cabinet meeting?  I would like to know what business you had at a
+Cabinet meeting?"</p>
+
+<p>I said I went there to consult&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But I had done the state some service, and I sent in my bill:</p>
+
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+
+
+     The United States of America in account with</td></tr><tr><td>
+     the Hon. Clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology,   </td><td>Dr</td></tr><tr><td>
+		 &nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+          To consultation with Secretary of War  </td><td>$50</td></tr><tr><td>
+          To consultation with Secretary of Navy  </td><td>$50</td></tr><tr><td>
+          To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury  </td><td>$50</td></tr><tr><td>
+          Cabinet consultation </td><td>No charge</td></tr><tr><td>
+          To mileage to and from Jerusalem, via Egypt,</td></tr><tr><td>
+               Algiers, Gibraltar, and Cadiz,</td></tr><tr><td>
+               14,000 miles, at 20c. a mile  </td><td>$2,800</td></tr><tr><td>
+          To salary as Clerk of Senate Committee</td></tr><tr><td>
+          on Conchology, six days, at $6 per day  </td><td>$36</td></tr><tr><td>
+&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
+                       &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  Total  </td><td>$2,986</td></tr><tr><td>
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>&mdash;[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.]</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;but they work.  I know one who has to paste all sorts of
+little scraps from the newspapers into a scrapbook&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;waiting patiently for a chance to help their
+country out&mdash;and while they are waiting, they only get barely two
+thousand dollars a year for it.  It is sad&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="history"></a>HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p271.jpg (103K)" src="images/p271.jpg" height="687" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>How touching is this tribute of the late Hon. T. H. Benton to his
+mother's influence:&mdash;'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 pious and correct wishes.  When I was seven years of
+age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total
+abstinence; and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my
+mother.'</p>
+
+<p>I never saw anything so curious.  It is almost an exact epitome of my own
+moral career&mdash;after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother.  How
+well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco, good old
+soul!  She said, "You're at it again, are you, you whelp?  Now don't ever
+let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay I'll
+blacksnake you within an inch of your life!"  I have never touched it at
+that hour of the morning from that time to the present day.</p>
+
+<p>She asked me not to gamble.  She whispered and said, "Put up those wicked
+cards this minute!&mdash;two pair and a jack, you numskull, and the other
+fellow's got a flush!"</p>
+
+<p>I never have gambled from that day to this&mdash;never once&mdash;without a "cold
+deck" in my pocket.  I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games
+that are being played unless I deal myself.</p>
+
+<p>When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a
+resolution of total abstinence.  That I have adhered to it and enjoyed
+the beneficent effects of it through all time, I owe to my grandmother.
+I have never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="curiosity"></a>HONORED AS A CURIOSITY
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p273.jpg (99K)" src="images/p273.jpg" height="884" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>If you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu, and experience
+that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by
+finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and
+address him as "Captain."  Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his
+countenance that you are on the wrong track, ask him where he preaches.
+It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler.
+I became personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six
+missionaries.  The captains and ministers form one-half of the
+population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile
+foreigners and their families; and the final fourth is made up of high
+officers of the Hawaiian Government.  And there are just about cats
+enough for three apiece all around.</p>
+
+<p>A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs one day, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning, your reverence.  Preach in the stone church yonder, no
+doubt!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't.  I'm not a preacher."</p>
+
+<p>"Really, I beg your pardon, captain.  I trust you had a good season.  How
+much oil&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oil!  Why, what do you take me for?  I'm not a whaler."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!  I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency.  Major-General in the
+household troops, no doubt?  Minister of the Interior, likely?  Secretary
+of War?  First Gentleman of the Bedchamber?  Commissioner of the Royal&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Stuff, man!  I'm not connected in any way with the government."</p>
+
+<p>"Bless my life!  Then who the mischief are you? what the mischief are
+you? and how the mischief did you get here? and where in thunder did you
+come from?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm only a private personage&mdash;an unassuming stranger&mdash;lately arrived
+from America."</p>
+
+<p>"No!  Not a missionary! not a whaler! not a member of his Majesty's
+government! not even a Secretary of the Navy!  Ah!  Heaven! it is too
+blissful to be true, alas! I do but dream.  And yet that noble, honest
+countenance&mdash;those oblique, ingenuous eyes&mdash;that massive head, incapable
+of&mdash;of anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif.  Excuse these
+tears.  For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this,
+and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away.  I pitied
+this poor creature from the bottom of my heart.  I was deeply moved.
+I shed a few tears on him, and kissed him for his mother.  I then took
+what small change he had, and "shoved."</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+<center>
+<table summary="" cellPadding=4 border=3>
+<tr><td>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p5.htm">Previous Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="3189-h.htm">Main Index</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p7.htm">Next Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ 
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
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+<title>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, Part 7</title>
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+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="p6.htm">Previous Part</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+</td><td>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="3189-h.htm">Main Index</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+
+ 
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center>
+<h1>SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
+</h1></center>
+
+<center><h3>by Mark Twain</h3></center>
+<br><br>
+
+<center><h3>Part 7.</h3></center>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+<center><img alt="bookcover.jpg (224K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" height="715" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="frontpiece.jpg (134K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" height="790" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<center><img alt="titlepage.jpg (38K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" height="850" width="650"></center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS:</h2>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+<a href="#ward">FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD</a><br><br>
+<a href="#cannibalism">CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS</a><br><br>
+<a href="#caesar">THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"</a><br><br>
+<a href="#widow">THE WIDOW'S PROTEST</a><br><br>
+<a href="#panoramist">THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST</a><br><br>
+<a href="#cold">CURING A COLD</a><br><br>
+<a href="#excursion">A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION</a><br><br>
+<a href="#governor">RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR</a><br><br>
+<a href="#mysterious">A MYSTERIOUS VISIT</a><br><br>
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="ward"></a>FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1870.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p283.jpg (107K)" src="images/p283.jpg" height="647" width="650">
+</center><br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>I had never seen him before.  He brought letters of introduction from
+mutual friends in San Francisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with
+him.  It was almost religion, there in the silver-mines, to precede such
+a meal with whisky cocktails.  Artemus, with the true cosmopolitan
+instinct, always deferred to the customs of the country he was in, and so
+he ordered three of those abominations.  Hingston was present.  I said I
+would rather not drink a whisky cocktail.  I said it would go right to my
+head, and confuse me so that I would be in a helpless tangle in ten
+minutes.  I did not want to act like a lunatic before strangers.  But
+Artemus gently insisted, and I drank the treasonable mixture under
+protest, and felt all the time that I was doing a thing I might be sorry
+for.  In a minute or two I began to imagine that my ideas were clouded.
+I waited in great anxiety for the conversation to open, with a sort of
+vague hope that my understanding would prove clear, after all, and my
+misgivings groundless.</p>
+
+<p>Artemus dropped an unimportant remark or two, and then assumed a look of
+superhuman earnestness, and made the following astounding speech.  He
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Now there is one thing I ought to ask you about before I forget it.  You
+have been here in Silver land&mdash;here in Nevada&mdash;two or three years, and,
+of course, your position on the daily press has made it necessary for you
+to go down in the mines and examine them carefully in detail, and
+therefore you know all about the silver-mining business.  Now what I want
+to get at is&mdash;is, well, the way the deposits of ore are made, you know.
+For instance.  Now, as I understand it, the vein which contains the
+silver is sandwiched in between casings of granite, and runs along the
+ground, and sticks up like a curb stone.  Well, take a vein forty feet
+thick, for example, or eighty, for that matter, or even a hundred&mdash;say
+you go down on it with a shaft, straight down, you know, or with what you
+call 'incline' maybe you go down five hundred feet, or maybe you don't go
+down but two hundred&mdash;anyway, you go down, and all the time this vein
+grows narrower, when the casings come nearer or approach each other, you
+may say&mdash;that is, when they do approach, which, of course, they do not
+always do, particularly in cases where the nature of the formation is
+such that they stand apart wider than they otherwise would, and which
+geology has failed to account for, although everything in that science
+goes to prove that, all things being equal, it would if it did not, or
+would not certainly if it did, and then, of course, they are.  Do not you
+think it is?"</p>
+
+<p>I said to myself:</p>
+
+<p>"Now I just knew how it would be&mdash;that whisky cocktail has done the
+business for me; I don't understand any more than a clam."</p>
+
+<p>And then I said aloud:</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I&mdash;that is&mdash;if you don't mind, would you&mdash;would you say that over
+again?  I ought&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, certainly, certainly!  You see I am very unfamiliar with the
+subject, and perhaps I don't present my case clearly, but I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no-no, no-you state it plain enough, but that cocktail has muddled
+me a little.  But I will&mdash;no, I do understand for that matter; but I would
+get the hang of it all the better if you went over it again&mdash;and I'll pay
+better attention this time."</p>
+
+<p>He said, "Why, what I was after was this."</p>
+
+<p>[Here he became even more fearfully impressive than ever, and emphasized
+each particular point by checking it off on his finger-ends.]</p>
+
+<p>"This vein, or lode, or ledge, or whatever you call it, runs along
+between two layers of granite, just the same as if it were a sandwich.
+Very well.  Now suppose you go down on that, say a thousand feet, or
+maybe twelve hundred (it don't really matter) before you drift, and then
+you start your drifts, some of them across the ledge, and others along
+the length of it, where the sulphurets&mdash;I believe they call them
+sulphurets, though why they should, considering that, so far as I can
+see, the main dependence of a miner does not so lie, as some suppose, but
+in which it cannot be successfully maintained, wherein the same should
+not continue, while part and parcel of the same ore not committed to
+either in the sense referred to, whereas, under different circumstances,
+the most inexperienced among us could not detect it if it were, or might
+overlook it if it did, or scorn the very idea of such a thing, even
+though it were palpably demonstrated as such.  Am I not right?"</p>
+
+<p>I said, sorrowfully: "I feel ashamed of myself, Mr.  Ward.  I know I
+ought to understand you perfectly well, but you see that treacherous
+whisky cocktail has got into my head, and now I cannot understand even
+the simplest proposition.  I told you how it would be."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't mind it, don't mind it; the fault was my own, no doubt&mdash;though
+I did think it clear enough for&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't say a word.  Clear!  Why, you stated it as clear as the sun to
+anybody but an abject idiot; but it's that confounded cocktail that has
+played the mischief."</p>
+
+<p>"No; now don't say that.  I'll begin it all over again, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't now&mdash;for goodness' sake, don't do anything of the kind, because I
+tell you my head is in such a condition that I don't believe I could
+understand the most trifling question a man could ask me.</p>
+
+<p>"Now don't you be afraid.  I'll put it so plain this time that you can't
+help but get the hang of it.  We will begin at the very beginning."
+[Leaning far across the table, with determined impressiveness wrought
+upon his every feature, and fingers prepared to keep tally of each point
+enumerated; and I, leaning forward with painful interest, resolved to
+comprehend or perish.]  "You know the vein, the ledge, the thing that
+contains the metal, whereby it constitutes the medium between all other
+forces, whether of present or remote agencies, so brought to bear in
+favor of the former against the latter, or the latter against the former
+or all, or both, or compromising the relative differences existing within
+the radius whence culminate the several degrees of similarity to which&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I said: "Oh, hang my wooden head, it ain't any use!&mdash;it ain't any use to
+try&mdash;I can't understand anything.  The plainer you get it the more I
+can't get the hang of it."</p>
+
+<p>I heard a suspicious noise behind me, and turned in time to see Hingston
+dodging behind a newspaper, and quaking with a gentle ecstasy of
+laughter.  I looked at Ward again, and he had thrown off his dread
+solemnity and was laughing also.  Then I saw that I had been sold&mdash;that I
+had been made a victim of a swindle in the way of a string of plausibly
+worded sentences that didn't mean anything under the sun.  Artemus Ward
+was one of the best fellows in the world, and one of the most
+companionable.  It has been said that he was not fluent in conversation,
+but, with the above experience in my mind, I differ.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="cannibalism"></a>CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1867.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p287.jpg (128K)" src="images/p287.jpg" height="848" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way West, after changing cars at
+Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about
+forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat
+down beside me.  We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an
+hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining.
+When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask
+questions about various public men, and about Congressional affairs; and
+I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly
+familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capital, even to
+the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and
+Representatives in the Chambers of the national Legislature.  Presently
+two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other:</p>
+
+<p>"Harris, if you'll do that for me, I'll never forget you, my boy."</p>
+
+<p>My new comrade's eye lighted pleasantly.  The words had touched upon a
+happy memory, I thought.  Then his face settled into
+thoughtfulness&mdash;almost into gloom.  He turned to me and said,</p>
+
+<p>"Let me tell you a story; let me give you a secret chapter of my
+life&mdash;a chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events
+transpired.  Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt
+me."</p>
+
+<p>I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure,
+speaking sometimes with animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always
+with feeling and earnestness.</p>
+
+<br>
+<center>                         <h3>THE STRANGER'S NARRATIVE</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>"On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening
+train bound for Chicago.  There were only twenty-four passengers, all
+told.  There were no ladies and no children.  We were in excellent
+spirits, and pleasant acquaintanceships were soon formed.  The journey
+bade fair to be a happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had
+even the vaguest presentiment of the horrors we were soon to undergo.</p>
+
+<p>"At 11 P.M. it began to snow hard.  Shortly after leaving the small
+village of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that
+stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward
+the Jubilee Settlements.  The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills, or
+even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving
+the falling snow before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy
+sea.  The snow was deepening fast; and we knew, by the diminished speed
+of the train, that the engine was plowing through it with steadily
+increasing difficulty.  Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes,
+in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves
+across the track.  Conversation began to flag.  Cheerfulness gave place
+to grave concern.  The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on
+the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every
+mind, and extended its depressing influence over every spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"At two o'clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by
+the ceasing of all motion about me.  The appalling truth flashed upon me
+instantly&mdash;we were captives in a snow-drift!  'All hands to the rescue!'
+Every man sprang to obey.  Out into the wild night, the pitchy darkness,
+the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the
+consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all.
+Shovels, hands, boards&mdash;anything, everything that could displace snow,
+was brought into instant requisition.  It was a weird picture, that small
+company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the blackest
+shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotive's reflector.</p>
+
+<p>"One short hour sufficed to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts.
+The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away.
+And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand charge the
+engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the
+driving-wheel!  With a free track before us we should still have been
+helpless.  We entered the car wearied with labor, and very sorrowful.
+We gathered about the stoves, and gravely canvassed our situation.  We
+had no provisions whatever&mdash;in this lay our chief distress.  We could not
+freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender.  This was our
+only comfort.  The discussion ended at last in accepting the
+disheartening decision of the conductor, viz., that it would be death for
+any man to attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that.
+We could not send for help, and even if we could it would not come.  We
+must submit, and await, as patiently as we might, succor or starvation!
+I think the stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words
+were uttered.</p>
+
+<p>"Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there
+about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the
+blast; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled
+themselves among the flickering shadows to think&mdash;to forget the present,
+if they could&mdash;to sleep, if they might.</p>
+
+<p>"The eternal night&mdash;it surely seemed eternal to us&mdash;wore its lagging hours
+away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east.  As the light
+grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of life, one
+after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from his
+forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out of the windows
+upon the cheerless prospect.  It was cheer less, indeed!&mdash;not a living
+thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a vast white
+desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the
+wind&mdash;a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above.</p>
+
+<p>"All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much.  Another
+lingering dreary night&mdash;and hunger.</p>
+
+<p>"Another dawning&mdash;another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger,
+hopeless watching for succor that could not come.  A night of restless
+slumber, filled with dreams of feasting&mdash;wakings distressed with the
+gnawings of hunger.</p>
+
+<p>"The fourth day came and went&mdash;and the fifth!  Five days of dreadful
+imprisonment!  A savage hunger looked out at every eye.  There was in it
+a sign of awful import&mdash;the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely
+shaping itself in every heart&mdash;a something which no tongue dared yet to
+frame into words.</p>
+
+<p>"The sixth day passed&mdash;the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and
+hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death.  It must
+out now!  That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready
+to leap from every lip at last!  Nature had been taxed to the utmost&mdash;she
+must yield.  RICHARD H. GASTON of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous, and pale,
+rose up.  All knew what was coming.  All prepared&mdash;every emotion, every
+semblance of excitement&mdash;was smothered&mdash;only a calm, thoughtful
+seriousness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild.</p>
+
+<p>"'Gentlemen: It cannot be delayed longer!  The time is at hand!  We must
+determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest!'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. JOHN J. WILLIAMS of Illinois rose and said: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I nominate
+the Rev. James Sawyer of Tennessee.'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. Wm. R. ADAMS of Indiana said: 'I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote of New
+York.'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. CHARLES J. LANGDON: 'I nominate Mr. Samuel A.  Bowen of St. Louis.'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. SLOTE: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A. Van
+Nostrand, Jun., of New Jersey.'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. GASTON: 'If there be no objection, the gentleman's desire will be
+acceded to.'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. VAN NOSTRAND objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected.
+The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and
+refused upon the same grounds.</p>
+
+<p>"MR. A. L. BASCOM of Ohio: 'I move that the nominations now close, and
+that the House proceed to an election by ballot.'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. SAWYER: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I protest earnestly against these proceedings.
+They are, in every way, irregular and unbecoming.  I must beg to move
+that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the meeting
+and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the
+business before us understandingly.'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. BELL of Iowa: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I object.  This is no time to stand upon
+forms and ceremonious observances.  For more than seven days we have been
+without food.  Every moment we lose in idle discussion increases our
+distress.  I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made&mdash;every
+gentleman present is, I believe&mdash;and I, for one, do not see why we should
+not proceed at once to elect one or more of them.  I wish to offer a
+resolution&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. GASTON: 'It would be objected to, and have to lie over one day under
+the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid.  The
+gentleman from New Jersey&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. VAN NOSTRAND: 'Gentlemen&mdash;I am a stranger among you; I have not
+sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a
+delicacy&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. MORGAN Of Alabama (interrupting): 'I move the previous question.'</p>
+
+<p>"The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course.  The
+motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen
+chairman, Mr. Blake, secretary, Messrs.  Holcomb, Dyer, and Baldwin a
+committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the
+committee in making selections.</p>
+
+<p>"A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucusing
+followed.  At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the
+committee reported in favor of Messrs. George Ferguson of Kentucky,
+Lucien Herrman of Louisiana, and W. Messick of Colorado as candidates.
+The report was accepted.</p>
+
+<p>"MR. ROGERS of Missouri: 'Mr. President&mdash;The report being properly before
+the House now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of Mr.
+Herrman that of Mr. Lucius Harris of St. Louis, who is well and
+honorably known to us all.  I do not wish to be understood as casting the
+least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentleman
+from Louisiana&mdash;far from it.  I respect and esteem him as much as any
+gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us can be blind to the
+fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here
+than any among us&mdash;none of us can be blind to the fact that the committee
+has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or a graver
+fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however pure
+his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"THE CHAIR: 'The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat.  The Chair
+cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned save by the
+regular course, under the rules.  What action will the House take upon
+the gentleman's motion?'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. HALLIDAY of Virginia: 'I move to further amend the report by
+substituting Mr. Harvey Davis of Oregon for Mr. Messick.  It may be urged
+by gentlemen that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have
+rendered Mr. Davis tough; but, gentlemen, is this a time to cavil at
+toughness?  Is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles?  Is this
+a time to dispute about matters of paltry significance?  No, gentlemen,
+bulk is what we desire&mdash;substance, weight, bulk&mdash;these are the supreme
+requisites now&mdash;not talent, not genius, not education.  I insist upon my
+motion.'</p>
+
+<p>"MR. MORGAN (excitedly): 'Mr.  Chairman&mdash;I do most strenuously object to
+this amendment.  The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is
+bulky only in bone&mdash;not in flesh.  I ask the gentleman from Virginia if
+it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance? if he would delude us
+with shadows?  if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonian specter?
+I ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can
+gaze into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant
+hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us?  I ask him
+if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark
+future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this
+tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from
+Oregon's inhospitable shores?  Never!' [Applause.]</p>
+
+<p>"The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery debate, and lost.  Mr.
+Harris was substituted on the first amendment.  The balloting then began.
+Five ballots were held without a choice.  On the sixth, Mr.  Harris was
+elected, all voting for him but himself.  It was then moved that his
+election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in
+consequence of his again voting against himself.</p>
+
+<p>"MR. RADWAY moved that the House now take up the remaining candidates,
+and go into an election for breakfast.  This was carried.</p>
+
+<p>"On the first ballot there was a tie, half the members favoring one
+candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account
+of his superior size.  The President gave the casting vote for the
+latter, Mr. Messick.  This decision created considerable dissatisfaction
+among the friends of Mr. Ferguson, the defeated candidate, and there was
+some talk of demanding a new ballot; but in the midst of it a motion to
+adjourn was carried, and the meeting broke up at once.</p>
+
+<p>"The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson
+faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then,
+when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr.
+Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds.</p>
+
+<p>"We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car-seats, and sat down
+with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our
+vision for seven torturing days.  How changed we were from what we had
+been a few short hours before!  Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger,
+feverish anxiety, desperation, then; thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep
+for utterance now.  That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful
+life.  The winds howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison house,
+but they were powerless to distress us any more.  I liked Harris.  He
+might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man
+ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree
+of satisfaction.  Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored,
+but for genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fiber, give me Harris.
+Messick had his good points&mdash;I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish
+to do it&mdash;but he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be,
+sir&mdash;not a bit.  Lean?&mdash;why, bless me!&mdash;and tough?  Ah, he was very
+tough!  You could not imagine it&mdash;you could never imagine anything like
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to tell me that&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Do not interrupt me, please.  After breakfast we elected a man by the
+name of Walker, from Detroit, for supper.  He was very good.  I wrote his
+wife so afterward.  He was worthy of all praise.  I shall always remember
+Walker.  He was a little rare, but very good.  And then the next morning
+we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I
+ever sat down to&mdash;handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages
+fluently&mdash;a perfect gentleman&mdash;he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly
+juicy.  For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud,
+there is no question about it&mdash;old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture
+the reality.  I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I
+will wait for another election.  And Grimes of Illinois said, 'Gentlemen,
+I will wait also.  When you elect a man that has something to recommend
+him, I shall be glad to join you again.'  It soon became evident that
+there was general dissatisfaction with Davis of Oregon, and so, to
+preserve the good will that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had
+Harris, an election was called, and the result of it was that Baker of
+Georgia was chosen.  He was splendid!  Well, well&mdash;after that we had
+Doolittle, and Hawkins, and McElroy (there was some complaint about
+McElroy, because he was uncommonly short and thin), and Penrod, and two
+Smiths, and Bailey (Bailey had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he
+was otherwise good), and an Indian boy, and an organ-grinder, and a
+gentleman by the name of Buckminster&mdash;a poor stick of a vagabond that
+wasn't any good for company and no account for breakfast.  We were glad
+we got him elected before relief came."</p>
+
+<p>"And so the blessed relief did come at last?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election.  John
+Murphy was the choice, and there never was a better, I am willing to
+testify; but John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to
+succor us, and lived to marry the widow Harris&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Relict of&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Relict of our first choice.  He married her, and is happy and respected
+and prosperous yet.  Ah, it was like a novel, sir&mdash;it was like a romance.
+This is my stopping-place, sir; I must bid you goodby.  Any time that you
+can make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be glad to
+have you.  I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you.
+I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir.  Good day, sir,
+and a pleasant journey."</p>
+
+<p>He was gone.  I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my
+life.  But in my soul I was glad he was gone.  With all his gentleness of
+manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye
+upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and
+that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly
+stood still!</p>
+
+<p>I was bewildered beyond description.  I did not doubt his word; I could
+not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness
+of truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my
+thoughts into hopeless confusion.  I saw the conductor looking at me.
+I said, "Who is that man?"</p>
+
+<p>"He was a member of Congress once, and a good one.  But he got caught in
+a snow-drift in the cars, and like to have been starved to death.  He got
+so frost-bitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of
+something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three
+months afterward.  He is all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when
+he gets on that old subject he never stops till he has eat up that whole
+car-load of people he talks about.  He would have finished the crowd by
+this time, only he had to get out here.  He has got their names as pat as
+A B C.  When he gets them all eat up but himself, he always says: 'Then
+the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived, and there
+being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no
+objections offered, I resigned.  Thus I am here.'"</p>
+
+<p>I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to
+the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a
+bloodthirsty cannibal.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="caesar"></a>THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1865.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p162.jpg (129K)" src="images/p162.jpg" height="884" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>Being the only true and reliable account ever published; taken from the
+Roman "Daily Evening Fasces," of the date of that tremendous occurrence.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfaction as
+gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder and writing
+them up with aggravating circumstantiality.  He takes a living delight in
+this labor of love&mdash;for such it is to him, especially if he knows that
+all the other papers have gone to press, and his will be the only one
+that will contain the dreadful intelligence.  A feeling of regret has
+often come over me that I was not reporting in Rome when Caesar was
+killed&mdash;reporting on an evening paper, and the only one in the city, and
+getting at least twelve hours ahead of the morning-paper boys with this
+most magnificent "item" that ever fell to the lot of the craft.  Other
+events have happened as startling as this, but none that possessed so
+peculiarly all the characteristics of the favorite "item" of the present
+day, magnified into grandeur and sublimity by the high rank, fame, and
+social and political standing of the actors in it.</p>
+
+<p>However, as I was not permitted to report Caesar's assassination in the
+regular way, it has at least afforded me rare satisfaction to translate
+the following able account of it from the original Latin of the Roman
+Daily Evening Fasces of that date&mdash;second edition:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<br>
+Our usually quiet city of Rome was thrown into a state of wild excitement
+yesterday by the occurrence of one of those bloody affrays which sicken
+the heart and fill the soul with fear, while they inspire all thinking
+men with forebodings for the future of a city where human life is held so
+cheaply and the gravest laws are so openly set at defiance.  As the
+result of that affray, it is our painful duty, as public journalists, to
+record the death of one of our most esteemed citizens&mdash;a man whose name
+is known wherever this paper circulates, and whose fame it has been our
+pleasure and our privilege to extend, and also to protect from the tongue
+of slander and falsehood, to the best of our poor ability.  We refer to
+Mr. J. Caesar, the Emperor-elect.
+
+<br><br>The facts of the case, as nearly as our reporter could determine them
+from the conflicting statements of eye-witnesses, were about as
+follows:&mdash;The affair was an election row, of course.  Nine-tenths of the ghastly
+butcheries that disgrace the city nowadays grow out of the bickerings and
+jealousies and animosities engendered by these accursed elections.  Rome
+would be the gainer by it if her very constables were elected to serve a
+century; for in our experience we have never even been able to choose a
+dog-pelter without celebrating the event with a dozen knockdowns and a
+general cramming of the station-house with drunken vagabonds overnight.
+It is said that when the immense majority for Caesar at the polls in the
+market was declared the other day, and the crown was offered to that
+gentleman, even his amazing unselfishness in refusing it three times was
+not sufficient to save him from the whispered insults of such men as
+Casca, of the Tenth Ward, and other hirelings of the disappointed
+candidate, hailing mostly from the Eleventh and Thirteenth and other
+outside districts, who were overheard speaking ironically and
+contemptuously of Mr. Caesar's conduct upon that occasion.
+
+<br><br>We are further informed that there are many among us who think they are
+justified in believing that the assassination of Julius Caesar was a
+put-up thing&mdash;a cut-and-dried arrangement, hatched by Marcus Brutus and a lot
+of his hired roughs, and carried out only too faithfully according to the
+program.  Whether there be good grounds for this suspicion or not, we
+leave to the people to judge for themselves, only asking that they will
+read the following account of the sad occurrence carefully and
+dispassionately before they render that judgment.
+
+<br><br>The Senate was already in session, and Caesar was coming down the street
+toward the capitol, conversing with some personal friends, and followed,
+as usual, by a large number of citizens.  Just as he was passing in front
+of Demosthenes and Thucydides' drug store, he was observing casually to a
+gentleman, who, our informant thinks, is a fortune-teller, that the Ides
+of March were come.  The reply was, "Yes, they are come, but not gone
+yet."  At this moment Artexnidorus stepped up and passed the time of day,
+and asked Caesar to read a schedule or a tract or something of the kind,
+which he had brought for his perusal.  Mr. Decius Brutus also said
+something about an "humble suit" which he wanted read.  Artexnidorus
+begged that attention might be paid to his first, because it was of
+personal consequence to Caesar.  The latter replied that what concerned
+himself should be read last, or words to that effect.  Artemidorus begged
+and beseeched him to read the paper instantly!&mdash;[Mark that: It is hinted
+by William Shakespeare, who saw the beginning and the end of the
+unfortunate affray, that this "schedule" was simply a note discovering to
+Caesar that a plot was brewing to take his life.]&mdash;However, Caesar
+shook him off, and refused to read any petition in the street.  He then
+entered the capitol, and the crowd followed him.
+
+<br><br>About this time the following conversation was overheard, and we consider
+that, taken in connection with the events which succeeded it, it bears an
+appalling significance:  Mr. Papilius Lena remarked to George W. Cassius
+(commonly known as the "Nobby Boy of the Third Ward"), a bruiser in the
+pay of the Opposition, that he hoped his enterprise to-day might thrive;
+and when Cassius asked "What enterprise?" he only closed his left eye
+temporarily and said with simulated indifference, "Fare you well," and
+sauntered toward Caesar.  Marcus Brutus, who is suspected of being the
+ringleader of the band that killed Caesar, asked what it was that Lena
+had said.  Cassius told him, and added in a low tone, "I fear our purpose
+is discovered."
+
+<br><br>Brutus told his wretched accomplice to keep an eye on Lena, and a moment
+after Cassius urged that lean and hungry vagrant, Casca, whose reputation
+here is none of the best, to be sudden, for he feared prevention.  He
+then turned to Brutus, apparently much excited, and asked what should be
+done, and swore that either he or Caesar would never turn back&mdash;he would
+kill himself first.  At this time Caesar was talking to some of the
+back-country members about the approaching fall elections, and paying little
+attention to what was going on around him.  Billy Trebonius got into
+conversation with the people's friend and Caesar's&mdash;Mark Antony&mdash;and
+under some pretense or other got him away, and Brutus, Decius, Casca,
+Cinna, Metellus Cimber, and others of the gang of infamous desperadoes
+that infest Rome at present, closed around the doomed Caesar.  Then
+Metellus Cimber knelt down and begged that his brother might be recalled
+from banishment, but Caesar rebuked him for his fawning conduct, and
+refused to grant his petition.  Immediately, at Cimber's request, first
+Brutus and then Cassias begged for the return of the banished Publius;
+but Caesar still refused.  He said he could not be moved; that he was as
+fixed as the North Star, and proceeded to speak in the most complimentary
+terms of the firmness of that star and its steady character.  Then he
+said he was like it, and he believed he was the only man in the country
+that was; therefore, since he was "constant" that Cimber should be
+banished, he was also "constant" that he should stay banished, and he'd
+be hanged if he didn't keep him so!
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p164.jpg (79K)" src="images/p164.jpg" height="589" width="631">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<br><br>Instantly seizing upon this shallow pretext for a fight, Casca sprang at
+Caesar and struck him with a dirk, Caesar grabbing him by the arm with
+his right hand, and launching a blow straight from the shoulder with his
+left, that sent the reptile bleeding to the earth.  He then backed up
+against Pompey's statue, and squared himself to receive his assailants.
+Cassias and Cimber and Cinna rushed upon him with their daggers drawn,
+and the former succeeded in inflicting a wound upon his body; but before
+he could strike again, and before either of the others could strike at
+all, Caesar stretched the three miscreants at his feet with as many blows
+of his powerful fist.  By this time the Senate was in an indescribable
+uproar; the throng of citizens in the lobbies had blockaded the doors in
+their frantic efforts to escape from the building, the sergeant-at-arms
+and his assistants were struggling with the assassins, venerable senators
+had cast aside their encumbering robes, and were leaping over benches and
+flying down the aisles in wild confusion toward the shelter of the
+committee-rooms, and a thousand voices were shouting "Po-lice!  Po-lice!"
+in discordant tones that rose above the frightful din like shrieking
+winds above the roaring of a tempest.  And amid it all great Caesar stood
+with his back against the statue, like a lion at bay, and fought his
+assailants weaponless and hand to hand, with the defiant bearing and the
+unwavering courage which he had shown before on many a bloody field.
+Billy Trebonius and Caius Legarius struck him with their daggers and
+fell, as their brother-conspirators before them had fallen.  But at last,
+when Caesar saw his old friend Brutus step forward armed with a murderous
+knife, it is said he seemed utterly overpowered with grief and amazement,
+and, dropping his invincible left arm by his side, he hid his face in the
+folds of his mantle and received the treacherous blow without an effort
+to stay the hand that gave it.  He only said, "Et tu, Brute?" and fell
+lifeless on the marble pavement.
+
+<br><br>We learn that the coat deceased had on when he was killed was the same
+one he wore in his tent on the afternoon of the day he overcame the
+Nervii, and that when it was removed from the corpse it was found to be
+cut and gashed in no less than seven different places.  There was nothing
+in the pockets.  It will be exhibited at the coroner's inquest, and will
+be damning proof of the fact of the killing.  These latter facts may be
+relied on, as we get them from Mark Antony, whose position enables him to
+learn every item of news connected with the one subject of absorbing
+interest of-to-day.
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p165.jpg (35K)" src="images/p165.jpg" height="269" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<br><br>LATER:&mdash;While the coroner was summoning a jury, Mark Antony and other
+friends of the late Caesar got hold of the body, and lugged it off to the
+Forum, and at last accounts Antony and Brutus were making speeches over
+it and raising such a row among the people that, as we go to press, the
+chief of police is satisfied there is going to be a riot, and is taking
+measures accordingly.
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="widow"></a>THE WIDOW'S PROTEST
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+
+<p>One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice (said the
+banker's clerk) was there in Corning during the war.  Dan Murphy enlisted
+as a private, and fought very bravely.  The boys all liked him, and when
+a wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was too heavy
+work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a sutler.  He
+made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for him.  She was
+a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to keep money
+when she got it.  She didn't waste a penny.</p>
+
+<p>On the contrary, she began to get miserly as her bank-account grew.  She
+grieved to part with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working
+life she had known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and
+without a dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering
+so again.  Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their
+esteem and respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she
+would like to have him embalmed and sent home, when you know the usual
+custom was to dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then
+inform his friends what had become of him.  Mrs.  Murphy jumped to the
+conclusion that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her
+dead husband, and so she telegraphed "Yes."  It was at the "wake" that
+the bill for embalming arrived and was presented to the widow.</p>
+
+<p>She uttered a wild, sad wail that pierced every heart, and said,
+"Sivinty-foive dollars for stooffin' Dan, blister their sowls!  Did thim
+divils suppose I was goin' to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such
+expinsive curiassities!"</p>
+
+<p>The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="panoramist"></a>THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1866.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p296.jpg (109K)" src="images/p296.jpg" height="893" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>"There was a fellow traveling around in that country," said Mr.
+Nickerson, "with a moral-religious show&mdash;a sort of scriptural
+panorama&mdash;and he hired a wooden-headed old slab to play the piano for him.  After
+the first night's performance the showman says:</p>
+
+<p>"'My friend, you seem to know pretty much all the tunes there are, and
+you worry along first rate.  But then, didn't you notice that sometimes
+last night the piece you happened to be playing was a little rough on the
+proprieties, so to speak&mdash;didn't seem to jibe with the general gait of
+the picture that was passing at the time, as it were&mdash;was a little
+foreign to the subject, you know&mdash;as if you didn't either trump or follow
+suit, you understand?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, no,' the fellow said; 'he hadn't noticed, but it might be; he had
+played along just as it came handy.'</p>
+
+<p>"So they put it up that the simple old dummy was to keep his eye on the
+panorama after that, and as soon as a stunning picture was reeled out he
+was to fit it to a dot with a piece of music that would help the audience
+to get the idea of the subject, and warm them up like a camp-meeting
+revival.  That sort of thing would corral their sympathies, the showman
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a big audience that night&mdash;mostly middle-aged and old people
+who belong to the church, and took a strong interest in Bible matters,
+and the balance were pretty much young bucks and heifers&mdash;they always
+come out strong on panoramas, you know, because it gives them a chance to
+taste one another's complexions in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the showman began to swell himself up for his lecture, and the old
+mud-jobber tackled the piano and ran his fingers up and down once or
+twice to see that she was all right, and the fellows behind the curtain
+commenced to grind out the panorama.  The showman balanced his weight on
+his right foot, and propped his hands over his hips, and flung his eyes
+over his shoulder at the scenery, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"'Ladies and gentlemen, the painting now before you illustrates the
+beautiful and touching parable of the Prodigal Son.  Observe the happy
+expression just breaking over the features of the poor, suffering
+youth&mdash;so worn and weary with his long march; note also the ecstasy beaming from
+the uplifted countenance of the aged father, and the joy that sparkles in
+the eyes of the excited group of youths and maidens, and seems ready to
+burst into the welcoming chorus from their lips.  The lesson, my friends,
+is as solemn and instructive as the story is tender and beautiful.'</p>
+
+<p>"The mud-jobber was all ready, and when the second speech was finished,
+struck up:</p>
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+                    "Oh, we'll all get blind drunk<br>
+                    When Johnny comes marching home!
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+<p>"Some of the people giggled, and some groaned a little.  The showman
+couldn't say a word; he looked at the pianist sharp, but he was all
+lovely and serene&mdash;he didn't know there was anything out of gear.</p>
+
+<p>"The panorama moved on, and the showman drummed up his grit and started
+in fresh.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ladies and gentlemen, the fine picture now unfolding itself to your
+gaze exhibits one of the most notable events in Bible history&mdash;our
+Saviour and His disciples upon the Sea of Galilee.  How grand, how
+awe-inspiring are the reflections which the subject invokes!  What sublimity
+of faith is revealed to us in this lesson from the sacred writings!  The
+Saviour rebukes the angry waves, and walks securely upon the bosom of the
+deep!'</p>
+
+<p>"All around the house they were whispering, 'Oh, how lovely, how
+beautiful!' and the orchestra let himself out again:</p>
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+                    "A life on the ocean wave,<br>
+                    And a home on the rolling deep!
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+
+<p>"There was a good deal of honest snickering turned on this time, and
+considerable groaning, and one or two old deacons got up and went out.
+The showman grated his teeth, and cursed the piano man to himself; but
+the fellow sat there like a knot on a log, and seemed to think he was
+doing first-rate.</p>
+
+<p>"After things got quiet the showman thought he would make one more
+stagger at it, anyway, though his confidence was beginning to get mighty
+shaky.  The supes started the panorama grinding along again, and he says:</p>
+
+<p>"'Ladies and gentlemen, this exquisite painting represents the raising of
+Lazarus from the dead by our Saviour.  The subject has been handled with
+marvelous skill by the artist, and such touching sweetness and tenderness
+of expression has he thrown into it that I have known peculiarly
+sensitive persons to be even affected to tears by looking at it.  Observe
+the half-confused, half-inquiring look upon the countenance of the
+awakened Lazarus.  Observe, also, the attitude and expression of the
+Saviour, who takes him gently by the sleeve of his shroud with one hand,
+while He points with the other toward the distant city.'</p>
+
+<p>"Before anybody could get off an opinion in the case the innocent old ass
+at the piano struck up:</p>
+
+<center>
+<table summary="">
+<tr><td>
+
+                    "Come rise up, William Ri-i-ley,<br>
+                    And go along with me!
+
+
+</td></tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+
+
+<p>"Whe-ew!  All the solemn old flats got up in a huff to go, and everybody
+else laughed till the windows rattled.</p>
+
+<p>"The showman went down and grabbed the orchestra and shook him up and
+says:</p>
+
+<p>"'That lets you out, you know, you chowder-headed old clam.  Go to the
+doorkeeper and get your money, and cut your stick&mdash;vamose the ranch!
+Ladies and gentlemen, circumstances over which I have no control compel
+me prematurely to dismiss the house.'"</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="cold"></a>CURING A COLD
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1864]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p300.jpg (138K)" src="images/p300.jpg" height="877" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>It is a good thing, perhaps, to write for the amusement of the public,
+but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction,
+their profit, their actual and tangible benefit.  The latter is the sole
+object of this article.  If it prove the means of restoring to health one
+solitary sufferer among my race, of lighting up once more the fire of
+hope and joy in his faded eyes, of bringing back to his dead heart again
+the quick, generous impulses of other days, I shall be amply rewarded for
+my labor; my soul will be permeated with the sacred delight a Christian
+feels when he has done a good, unselfish deed.</p>
+
+<p>Having led a pure and blameless life, I am justified in believing that no
+man who knows me will reject the suggestions I am about to make, out of
+fear that I am trying to deceive him.  Let the public do itself the honor
+to read my experience in doctoring a cold, as herein set forth, and then
+follow in my footsteps.</p>
+
+<p>When the White House was burned in Virginia City, I lost my home, my
+happiness, my constitution, and my trunk.  The loss of the two first
+named articles was a matter of no great consequence, since a home without
+a mother, or a sister, or a distant young female relative in it, to
+remind you, by putting your soiled linen out of sight and taking your
+boots down off the mantelpiece, that there are those who think about you
+and care for you, is easily obtained.  And I cared nothing for the loss
+of my happiness, because, not being a poet, it could not be possible that
+melancholy would abide with me long.  But to lose a good constitution and
+a better trunk were serious misfortunes.  On the day of the fire my
+constitution succumbed to a severe cold, caused by undue exertion in
+getting ready to do something.  I suffered to no purpose, too, because
+the plan I was figuring at for the extinguishing of the fire was so
+elaborate that I never got it completed until the middle of the following
+week.</p>
+
+<p>The first time I began to sneeze, a friend told me to go and bathe my
+feet in hot water and go to bed.  I did so.  Shortly afterwards, another
+friend advised me to get up and take a cold shower-bath.  I did that
+also.  Within the hour, another friend assured me that it was policy to
+"feed a cold and starve a fever."  I had both.  So I thought it best to
+fill myself up for the cold, and then keep dark and let the fever starve
+awhile.</p>
+
+<p>In a case of this kind, I seldom do things by halves; I ate pretty
+heartily; I conferred my custom upon a stranger who had just opened his
+restaurant that morning; he waited near me in respectful silence until I
+had finished feeding my cold, when he inquired if the people about
+Virginia City were much afflicted with colds?  I told him I thought they
+were.  He then went out and took in his sign.</p>
+
+<p>I started down toward the office, and on the way encountered another
+bosom friend, who told me that a quart of salt-water, taken warm, would
+come as near curing a cold as anything in the world.  I hardly thought I
+had room for it, but I tried it anyhow.  The result was surprising.  I
+believed I had thrown up my immortal soul.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as I am giving my experience only for the benefit of those who are
+troubled with the distemper I am writing about, I feel that they will see
+the propriety of my cautioning them against following such portions of it
+as proved inefficient with me, and acting upon this conviction, I warn
+them against warm salt-water.  It may be a good enough remedy, but I
+think it is too severe.  If I had another cold in the head, and there
+were no course left me but to take either an earthquake or a quart of
+warm saltwater, I would take my chances on the earthquake.</p>
+
+<p>After the storm which had been raging in my stomach had subsided, and no
+more good Samaritans happening along, I went on borrowing handkerchiefs
+again and blowing them to atoms, as had been my custom in the early
+stages of my cold, until I came across a lady who had just arrived from
+over the plains, and who said she had lived in a part of the country
+where doctors were scarce, and had from necessity acquired considerable
+skill in the treatment of simple "family complaints."  I knew she must
+have had much experience, for she appeared to be a hundred and fifty
+years old.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p302.jpg (32K)" src="images/p302.jpg" height="425" width="345">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>She mixed a decoction composed of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and
+various other drugs, and instructed me to take a wine-glass full of it
+every fifteen minutes.  I never took but one dose; that was enough; it
+robbed me of all moral principle, and awoke every unworthy impulse of my
+nature.  Under its malign influence my brain conceived miracles of
+meanness, but my hands were too feeble to execute them; at that time, had
+it not been that my strength had surrendered to a succession of assaults
+from infallible remedies for my cold, I am satisfied that I would have
+tried to rob the graveyard.  Like most other people, I often feel mean,
+and act accordingly; but until I took that medicine I had never reveled
+in such supernatural depravity, and felt proud of it.  At the end of two
+days I was ready to go to doctoring again.  I took a few more unfailing
+remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs.</p>
+
+<p>I got to coughing incessantly, and my voice fell below zero; I conversed
+in a thundering bass, two octaves below my natural tone; I could only
+compass my regular nightly repose by coughing myself down to a state of
+utter exhaustion, and then the moment I began to talk in my sleep, my
+discordant voice woke me up again.</p>
+
+<p>My case grew more and more serious every day.  A plain gin was
+recommended; I took it.  Then gin and molasses; I took that also.  Then
+gin and onions; I added the onions, and took all three.  I detected no
+particular result, however, except that I had acquired a breath like a
+buzzard's.</p>
+
+<p>I found I had to travel for my health.  I went to Lake Bigler with my
+reportorial comrade, Wilson.  It is gratifying to me to reflect that we
+traveled in considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my
+friend took all his baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk
+handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype of his grandmother.  We sailed and
+hunted and fished and danced all day, and I doctored my cough all night.
+By managing in this way, I made out to improve every hour in the
+twenty-four.  But my disease continued to grow worse.</p>
+
+<p>A sheet-bath was recommended.  I had never refused a remedy yet, and it
+seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a
+sheet-bath, notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it
+was.  It was administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty.
+My breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a
+thousand yards of it) soaked in ice-water, was wound around me until I
+resembled a swab for a Columbiad.</p>
+
+<p>It is a cruel expedient.  When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh,
+it makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men
+do in the death-agony.  It froze the marrow in my bones and stopped the
+beating of my heart.  I thought my time had come.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p304.jpg (24K)" src="images/p304.jpg" height="431" width="349">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a
+negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp,
+and came near being drowned.  He floundered around, though, and finally
+rose up out of the water considerably strangled and furiously angry, and
+started ashore at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with
+great asperity, that "one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to
+get killed wid jis' such damn foolishness as dis!"</p>
+
+<p>Never take a sheet-bath&mdash;never.  Next to meeting a lady acquaintance who,
+for reasons best known to herself, don't see you when she looks at you,
+and don't know you when she does see you, it is the most uncomfortable
+thing in the world.</p>
+
+<p>But, as I was saying, when the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough,
+a lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my
+breast.  I believe that would have cured me effectually, if it had not
+been for young Wilson.  When I went to bed, I put my mustard
+plaster&mdash;which was a very gorgeous one, eighteen inches square&mdash;where I could
+reach it when I was ready for it.  But young Wilson got hungry in the
+night, and&mdash;here is food for the imagination.</p>
+
+<p>After sojourning a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and,
+besides the steam-baths, I took a lot of the vilest medicines that were
+ever concocted.  They would have cured me, but I had to go back to
+Virginia City, where, notwithstanding the variety of new remedies I
+absorbed every day, I managed to aggravate my disease by carelessness and
+undue exposure.</p>
+
+<p>I finally concluded to visit San Francisco, and the first day I got
+there a lady at the hotel told me to drink a quart of whisky every
+twenty-four hours, and a friend up-town recommended precisely the same
+course.  Each advised me to take a quart; that made half a gallon.  I did
+it, and still live.</p>
+
+<p>Now, with the kindest motives in the world, I offer for the consideration
+of consumptive patients the variegated course of treatment I have lately
+gone through.  Let them try it; if it don't cure, it can't more than kill
+them.</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p305.jpg (24K)" src="images/p305.jpg" height="453" width="339">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="excursion"></a>A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Published at the time of the "Comet Scare" in the summer of 1874]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p306.jpg (111K)" src="images/p306.jpg" height="889" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>[We have received the following advertisement, but, inasmuch as it
+concerns a matter of deep and general interest, we feel fully justified
+in inserting it in our reading-columns.  We are confident that our
+conduct in this regard needs only explanation, not apology.&mdash;Ed., N. Y.
+Herald.]</p>
+
+
+<center><h3>ADVERTISEMENT</h3></center>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+<br>This is to inform the public that in connection with Mr. Barnum I have
+leased the comet for a term of years; and I desire also to solicit the
+public patronage in favor of a beneficial enterprise which we have in
+view.
+<br>
+<br>We propose to fit up comfortable, and even luxurious, accommodations in
+the comet for as many persons as will honor us with their patronage, and
+make an extended excursion among the heavenly bodies.  We shall prepare
+1,000,000 state-rooms in the tail of the comet (with hot and cold water,
+gas, looking-glass, parachute, umbrella, etc., in each), and shall
+construct more if we meet with a sufficiently generous encouragement.
+We shall have billiard-rooms, card-rooms, music-rooms, bowling-alleys and
+many spacious theaters and free libraries; and on the main deck we
+propose to have a driving park, with upward of 100,000 miles of roadway
+in it.  We shall publish daily newspapers also.
+
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<center>                          <h3>DEPARTURE OF THE COMET</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>The comet will leave New York at 10 P.M.  on the 20th inst., and
+therefore it will be desirable that the passengers be on board by eight
+at the latest, to avoid confusion in getting under way.  It is not known
+whether passports will be necessary or not, but it is deemed best that
+passengers provide them, and so guard against all contingencies.  No dogs
+will be allowed on board.  This rule has been made in deference to the
+existing state of feeling regarding these animals, and will be strictly
+adhered to.  The safety of the passengers will in all ways be jealously
+looked to.  A substantial iron railing will be put up all around the
+comet, and no one will be allowed to go to the edge and look over unless
+accompanied by either my partner or myself.</p>
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>THE POSTAL SERVICE</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>will be of the completest character.  Of course the telegraph, and the
+telegraph only, will be employed; consequently friends occupying
+state-rooms 20,000,000 and even 30,000,000 miles apart will be able to send a
+message and receive a reply inside of eleven days.  Night messages will
+be half-rate.  The whole of this vast postal system will be under the
+personal superintendence of Mr. Hale of Maine.  Meals served at all
+hours.  Meals served in staterooms charged extra.</p>
+
+<p>Hostility is not apprehended from any great planet, but we have thought
+it best to err on the safe side, and therefore have provided a proper
+number of mortars, siege-guns, and boarding-pikes.  History shows that
+small, isolated communities, such as the people of remote islands, are
+prone to be hostile to strangers, and so the same may be the case with</p>
+
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>THE INHABITANTS OF STARS</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>of the tenth or twentieth magnitude.  We shall in no case wantonly offend
+the people of any star, but shall treat all alike with urbanity and
+kindliness, never conducting ourselves toward an asteroid after a fashion
+which we could not venture to assume toward Jupiter or Saturn.  I repeat
+that we shall not wantonly offend any star; but at the same time we shall
+promptly resent any injury that may be done us, or any insolence offered
+us, by parties or governments residing in any star in the firmament.
+Although averse to the shedding of blood, we shall still hold this course
+rigidly and fearlessly, not only toward single stars, but toward
+constellations.  We shall hope to leave a good impression of America
+behind us in every nation we visit, from Venus to Uranus.  And, at all
+events, if we cannot inspire love we shall at least compel respect for
+our country wherever we go.  We shall take with us, free of charge,</p>
+
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>A GREAT FORCE OF MISSIONARIES,</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>and shed the true light upon all the celestial orbs which, physically
+aglow, are yet morally in darkness.  Sunday-schools will be established
+wherever practicable.  Compulsory education will also be introduced.</p>
+
+<p>The comet will visit Mars first, and proceed to Mercury, Jupiter, Venus,
+and Saturn.  Parties connected with the government of the District of
+Columbia and with the former city government of New York, who may desire
+to inspect the rings, will be allowed time and every facility.  Every
+star of prominent magnitude will be visited, and time allowed for
+excursions to points of interest inland.</p>
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>THE DOG STAR</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>has been stricken from the program.  Much time will be spent in the Great
+Bear, and, indeed, in every constellation of importance.  So, also, with
+the Sun and Moon and the Milky Way, otherwise the Gulf Stream of the
+Skies.  Clothing suitable for wear in the sun should be provided.  Our
+program has been so arranged that we shall seldom go more than
+100,000,000 of miles at a time without stopping at some star.  This will
+necessarily make the stoppages frequent and preserve the interest of the
+tourist.  Baggage checked through to any point on the route.  Parties
+desiring to make only a part of the proposed tour, and thus save expense,
+may stop over at any star they choose and wait for the return voyage.</p>
+
+<p>After visiting all the most celebrated stars and constellations in our
+system and personally inspecting the remotest sparks that even the most
+powerful telescope can now detect in the firmament, we shall proceed with
+good heart upon</p>
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>A STUPENDOUS VOYAGE</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>of discovery among the countless whirling worlds that make turmoil in the
+mighty wastes of space that stretch their solemn solitudes, their
+unimaginable vastness billions upon billions of miles away beyond the
+farthest verge of telescopic vision, till by comparison the little
+sparkling vault we used to gaze at on Earth shall seem like a remembered
+phosphorescent flash of spangles which some tropical voyager's prow
+stirred into life for a single instant, and which ten thousand miles of
+phosphorescent seas and tedious lapse of time had since diminished to an
+incident utterly trivial in his recollection.  Children occupying seats
+at the first table will be charged full fare.</p>
+
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>FIRST-CLASS FARE</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>from the Earth to Uranus, including visits to the Sun and Moon and all
+the principal planets on the route, will be charged at the low rate of
+$2 for every 50,000,000 miles of actual travel.  A great reduction will
+be made where parties wish to make the round trip.  This comet is new and
+in thorough repair and is now on her first voyage.  She is confessedly
+the fastest on the line.  She makes 20,000,000 miles a day, with her
+present facilities; but, with a picked American crew and good weather,
+we are confident we can get 40,000,000 out of her.  Still, we shall never
+push her to a dangerous speed, and we shall rigidly prohibit racing with
+other comets.  Passengers desiring to diverge at any point or return will
+be transferred to other comets.  We make close connections at all
+principal points with all reliable lines.  Safety can be depended upon.
+It is not to be denied that the heavens are infested with</p>
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>OLD RAMSHACKLE COMETS</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>that have not been inspected or overhauled in 10,000 years, and which
+ought long ago to have been destroyed or turned into hail-barges, but
+with these we have no connection whatever.  Steerage passengers not
+allowed abaft the main hatch.</p>
+
+<p>Complimentary round-trip tickets have been tendered to General Butler,
+Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Richardson, and other eminent gentlemen, whose public
+services have entitled them to the rest and relaxation of a voyage of
+this kind.  Parties desiring to make the round trip will have extra
+accommodation.  The entire voyage will be completed, and the passengers
+landed in New York again, on the 14th of December, 1991.  This is, at
+least, forty years quicker than any other comet can do it in.  Nearly all
+the back-pay members contemplate making the round trip with us in case
+their constituents will allow them a holiday.  Every harmless amusement
+will be allowed on board, but no pools permitted on the run of the
+comet&mdash;no gambling of any kind.  All fixed stars will be respected by us, but
+such stars as seem to need fixing we shall fix.  If it makes trouble, we
+shall be sorry, but firm.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Coggia having leased his comet to us, she will no longer be called by
+his name, but by my partner's.  N. B.&mdash;Passengers by paying double fare
+will be entitled to a share in all the new stars, suns, moons, comets,
+meteors, and magazines of thunder and lightning we may discover.
+Patent-medicine people will take notice that</p>
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>WE CARRY BULLETIN-BOARDS</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>and a paint-brush along for use in the constellations, and are open to
+terms.  Cremationists are reminded that we are going straight to&mdash;some
+hot places&mdash;and are open to terms.  To other parties our enterprise is a
+pleasure excursion, but individually we mean business.  We shall fly our
+comet for all it is worth.</p>
+
+<br>
+<center>                          <h3>FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS,</h3>
+</center>
+
+<p>or for freight or passage, apply on board, or to my partner, but not to
+me, since I do not take charge of the comet until she is under way.
+It is necessary, at a time like this, that my mind should not be burdened
+with small business details.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MARK TWAIN.</p>
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="governor"></a>RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR
+</h2></center>
+<center><h3>[Written about 1870.]
+</h3></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p311.jpg (141K)" src="images/p311.jpg" height="879" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>A few months ago I was nominated for Governor of the great state of New
+York, to run against Mr. John T. Smith and Mr. Blank J. Blank on an
+independent ticket.  I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage
+over these gentlemen, and that was&mdash;good character.  It was easy to see
+by the newspapers that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good
+name, that time had gone by.  It was plain that in these latter years
+they had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes.  But at the
+very moment that I was exalting my advantage and joying in it in secret,
+there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort "riling" the deeps of my
+happiness, and that was&mdash;the having to hear my name bandied about in
+familiar connection with those of such people.  I grew more and more
+disturbed.  Finally I wrote my grandmother about it.  Her answer came
+quick and sharp.  She said:</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed
+     of&mdash;not one.  Look at the newspapers&mdash;look at them and comprehend
+     what sort of characters Messrs.  Smith and Blank are, and then see
+     if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a
+     public canvass with them.
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>It was my very thought!  I did not sleep a single moment that night.
+But, after all, I could not recede.</p>
+
+<p>I was fully committed, and must go on with the fight.  As I was looking
+listlessly over the papers at breakfast I came across this paragraph,
+and I may truly say I never was so confounded before.</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     PERJURY.&mdash;Perhaps, now that Mr. Mark Twain is before the people as a
+     candidate for Governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to
+     be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses in Wakawak, Cochin
+     China, in 1863, the intent of which perjury being to rob a poor
+     native widow and her helpless family of a meager plantain-patch,
+     their only stay and support in their bereavement and desolation.
+     Mr. Twain owes it to himself, as well as to the great people whose
+     suffrages he asks, to clear this matter up.  Will he do it?
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>I thought I should burst with amazement!  Such a cruel, heartless charge!
+I never had seen Cochin China!  I never had heard of Wakawak!  I didn't
+know a plantain-patch from a kangaroo!  I did not know what to do.  I was
+crazed and helpless.  I let the day slip away without doing anything at
+all.  The next morning the same paper had this&mdash;nothing more:</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     SIGNIFICANT.&mdash;Mr.  Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively
+     silent about the Cochin China perjury.
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<p>[Mem.&mdash;During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to me in
+any other way than as "the infamous perjurer Twain."]</p>
+
+<p>Next came the Gazette, with this:</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     WANTED TO KNOW.&mdash;Will the new candidate for Governor deign to
+     explain to certain of his fellow-citizens (who are suffering to vote
+     for him!) the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Montana
+     losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these
+     things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his
+     "trunk" (newspaper he rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to
+     give him a friendly admonition for his own good, and so tarred and
+     feathered him, and rode him on a rail; and then advised him to leave
+     a permanent vacuum in the place he usually occupied in the camp.
+     Will he do this?
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that?  For I never was
+in Montana in my life.</p>
+
+<p>[After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as, "Twain, the Montana
+Thief."]</p>
+
+<p>I got to picking up papers apprehensively&mdash;much as one would lift a
+desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it.
+One day this met my eye:</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     THE LIE NAILED.&mdash;By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan,
+     Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr. Snub Rafferty and Mr. Catty
+     Mulligan, of Water Street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's
+     vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble
+		 standard-bearer, Blank J. Blank, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal
+     and gratuitous LIE, without a shadow of foundation in fact.  It is
+     disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to
+     to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their
+     graves, and defiling their honored names with slander.  When we
+     think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the
+     innocent relatives and friends of the deceased, we are almost driven
+     to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful
+     vengeance upon the traducer.  But no! let us leave him to the agony
+     of a lacerated conscience (though if passion should get the better
+     of the public, and in its blind fury they should do the traducer
+     bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict and
+     no court punish the perpetrators of the deed).
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>The ingenious closing sentence had the effect of moving me out of bed
+with despatch that night, and out at the back door also, while the
+"outraged and insulted public" surged in the front way, breaking
+furniture and windows in their righteous indignation as they came,
+and taking off such property as they could carry when they went.
+And yet I can lay my hand upon the Book and say that I never slandered
+Mr. Blank's grandfather.  More: I had never even heard of him or
+mentioned him up to that day and date.</p>
+
+<p>[I will state, in passing, that the journal above quoted from always
+referred to me afterward as "Twain, the Body-Snatcher."]</p>
+
+<p>The next newspaper article that attracted my attention was the following:</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     A SWEET CANDIDATE.&mdash;Mr.  Mark Twain, who was to make such a
+     blighting speech at the mass-meeting of the Independents last night,
+     didn't come to time!  A telegram from his physician stated that he
+     had been knocked down by a runaway team, and his leg broken in two
+     places&mdash;sufferer lying in great agony, and so forth, and so forth,
+     and a lot more bosh of the same sort.  And the Independents tried
+     hard to swallow the wretched subterfuge, and pretend that they did
+     not know what was the real reason of the absence of the abandoned
+     creature whom they denominate their standard-bearer.  A certain man
+     was seen to reel into Mr.  Twain's hotel last night in a state of
+     beastly intoxication.  It is the imperative duty of the Independents
+     to prove that this besotted brute was not Mark Twain himself.  We
+     have them at last!  This is a case that admits of no shirking.  The
+     voice of the people demands in thunder tones, "WHO WAS THAT MAN?"
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>It was incredible, absolutely incredible, for a moment, that it was
+really my name that was coupled with this disgraceful suspicion.  Three
+long years had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine or
+liquor of any kind.</p>
+
+<p>[It shows what effect the times were having on me when I say that I saw
+myself, confidently dubbed "Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain" in the next issue
+of that journal without a pang&mdash;notwithstanding I knew that with
+monotonous fidelity the paper would go on calling me so to the very end.]</p>
+
+<p>By this time anonymous letters were getting to be an important part of my
+mail matter.  This form was common:</p>
+
+
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     How about that old woman you kiked of your premises which
+     was beging.<br>                             POL. PRY.
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>And this:</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     There is things which you have done which is unbeknowens to anybody
+     but me.  You better trot out a few dots, to yours truly, or you'll
+     hear through the papers from<br>
+                                             HANDY ANDY.
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>This is about the idea.  I could continue them till the reader was
+surfeited, if desirable.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly the principal Republican journal "convicted" me of wholesale
+bribery, and the leading Democratic paper "nailed" an aggravated case of
+blackmailing to me.</p>
+
+<p>[In this way I acquired two additional names: "Twain the Filthy
+Corruptionist" and "Twain the Loathsome Embracer."]</p>
+
+<p>By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an "answer" to all
+the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of
+my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any
+longer.   As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following
+appeared in one of the papers the very next day:</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     BEHOLD THE MAN!&mdash;The independent candidate still maintains silence.
+     Because he dare not speak.  Every accusation against him has been
+     amply proved, and they have been indorsed and reindorsed by his own
+     eloquent silence, till at this day he stands forever convicted.
+     Look upon your candidate, Independents!  Look upon the Infamous
+     Perjurer!  the Montana Thief!  the Body-Snatcher!  Contemplate your
+     incarnate Delirium Tremens!  your Filthy Corruptionist!  your
+     Loathsome Embracer!  Gaze upon him&mdash;ponder him well&mdash;and then say if
+     you can give your honest votes to a creature who has earned this
+     dismal array of titles by his hideous crimes, and dares not open his
+     mouth in denial of any one of them!
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so, in deep
+humiliation, I set about preparing to "answer" a mass of baseless charges
+and mean and wicked falsehoods.  But I never finished the task, for the
+very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity,
+and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all its
+inmates, because it obstructed the view from my house.  This threw me
+into a sort of panic.  Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get
+his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened.
+This drove me to the verge of distraction.  On top of this I was accused
+of employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food
+for the foundling hospital when I warden.  I was wavering&mdash;wavering.
+And at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution
+that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children,
+of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness, were taught to rush
+onto the platform at a public meeting, and clasp me around the legs and
+call me PA!</p>
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><img alt="p315.jpg (58K)" src="images/p315.jpg" height="505" width="637">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>I gave it up.  I hauled down my colors and surrendered.  I was not equal
+to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the state of New York,
+and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of
+spirit signed it, "Truly yours, once a decent man, but now</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"MARK TWAIN, LLP., M.T., B.S., D.T., F.C., and L.E."</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br><br>
+<center><h2><a name="mysterious"></a>A MYSTERIOUS VISIT
+</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<center><img alt="p316.jpg (90K)" src="images/p316.jpg" height="611" width="650">
+</center>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+<p>
+The first notice that was taken of me when I "settled down" recently was
+by a gentleman who said he was an assessor, and connected with the U. S.
+Internal Revenue Department.  I said I had never heard of his branch of
+business before, but I was very glad to see him all the same.  Would he
+sit down?  He sat down.  I did not know anything particular to say, and
+yet I felt that people who have arrived at the dignity of keeping house
+must be conversational, must be easy and sociable in company.  So, in
+default of anything else to say, I asked him if he was opening his shop
+in our neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p>He said he was.  [I did not wish to appear ignorant, but I had hoped he
+would mention what he had for sale.]</p>
+
+<p>I ventured to ask him "How was trade?"  And he said "So-so."</p>
+
+<p>I then said we would drop in, and if we liked his house as well as any
+other, we would give him our custom.</p>
+
+<p>He said he thought we would like his establishment well enough to confine
+ourselves to it&mdash;said he never saw anybody who would go off and hunt up
+another man in his line after trading with him once.</p>
+
+<p>That sounded pretty complacent, but barring that natural expression of
+villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how it came about exactly, but gradually we appeared to
+melt down and run together, conversationally speaking, and then
+everything went along as comfortably as clockwork.</p>
+
+<p>We talked, and talked, and talked&mdash;at least I did; and we laughed, and
+laughed, and laughed&mdash;at least he did.  But all the time I had my
+presence of mind about me&mdash;I had my native shrewdness turned on "full
+head," as the engineers say.  I was determined to find out all about his
+business in spite of his obscure answers&mdash;and I was determined I would
+have it out of him without his suspecting what I was at.  I meant to trap
+him with a deep, deep ruse.  I would tell him all about my own business,
+and he would naturally so warm to me during this seductive burst of
+confidence that he would forget himself, and tell me all about his
+affairs before he suspected what I was about.  I thought to myself, My
+son, you little know what an old fox you are dealing with.  I said:</p>
+
+<p>"Now you never would guess what I made lecturing this winter and last
+spring?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;don't believe I could, to save me.  Let me see&mdash;let me see.   About
+two thousand dollars, maybe?  But no; no, sir, I know you couldn't have
+made that much.   Say seventeen hundred, maybe?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! ha!  I knew you couldn't.  My lecturing receipts for last spring and
+this winter were fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.  What
+do you think of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it is amazing-perfectly amazing.  I will make a note of it.  And
+you say even this wasn't all?"</p>
+
+<p>"All!  Why bless you, there was my income from the Daily Warwhoop for
+four months&mdash;about&mdash;about&mdash;well, what should you say to about eight
+thousand dollars, for instance?"</p>
+
+<p>"Say!  Why, I should say I should like to see myself rolling in just such
+another ocean of affluence.  Eight thousand!  I'll make a note of it.
+Why man!&mdash;and on top of all this am I to understand that you had still
+more income?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! ha! ha!  Why, you're only in the suburbs of it, so to speak.
+There's my book, The Innocents Abroad&mdash;price $3.50 to $5, according to the
+binding.  Listen to me.  Look me in the eye.  During the last four months
+and a half, saying nothing of sales before that, but just simply during
+the four months and a half, we've sold ninety-five thousand copies of
+that book.  Ninety-five thousand!  Think of it.  Average four dollars a
+copy, say.  It's nearly four hundred thousand dollars, my son.  I get
+half."</p>
+
+<p>"The suffering Moses!  I'll set that down.
+Fourteen-seven&mdash;fifty-eight&mdash;two hundred.  Total, say&mdash;well, upon my word, the grand total is about
+two hundred and thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars!  Is that
+possible?"</p>
+
+<p>"Possible!  If there's any mistake it's the other way.  Two hundred and
+fourteen thousand, cash, is my income for this year if I know how to
+cipher."</p>
+
+<p>Then the gentleman got up to go.  It came over me most uncomfortably that
+maybe I had made my revelations for nothing, besides being flattered into
+stretching them considerably by the stranger's astonished exclamations.
+But no; at the last moment the gentleman handed me a large envelope, and
+said it contained his advertisement; and that I would find out all about
+his business in it; and that he would be happy to have my custom&mdash;would,
+in fact, be proud to have the custom of a man of such prodigious income;
+and that he used to think there were several wealthy men in the city, but
+when they came to trade with him he discovered that they barely had
+enough to live on; and that, in truth, it had been such a weary, weary
+age since he had seen a rich man face to face, and talked to him, and
+touched him with his hands, that he could hardly refrain from embracing
+me&mdash;in fact, would esteem it a great favor if I would let him embrace me.</p>
+
+<p>This so pleased me that I did not try to resist, but allowed this
+simple-hearted stranger to throw his arms about me and weep a few tranquilizing
+tears down the back of my neck.  Then he went his way.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he was gone I opened his advertisement.  I studied it
+attentively for four minutes.  I then called up the cook, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Hold me while I faint!  Let Marie turn the griddle-cakes."</p>
+
+<p>By and by, when I came to, I sent down to the rum-mill on the corner and
+hired an artist by the week to sit up nights and curse that stranger, and
+give me a lift occasionally in the daytime when I came to a hard place.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, what a miscreant he was!  His "advertisement"  was nothing in the
+world but a wicked tax-return&mdash;a string of impertinent questions about
+my private affairs, occupying the best part of four fools-cap pages of
+fine print&mdash;questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous
+ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn't understand what the
+most of them were driving at&mdash;questions, too, that were calculated to
+make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from
+swearing to a falsehood.  I looked for a loophole, but there did not
+appear to be any.  Inquiry No. 1 covered my case as generously and as
+amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill:</p>
+<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>
+     What were your profits, during the past year, from any trade,
+     business, or vocation, wherever carried on?
+</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
+<p>And that inquiry was backed up by thirteen others of an equally searching
+nature, the most modest of which required information as to whether I had
+committed any burglary or highway robbery, or by any arson or other
+secret source of emolument had acquired property which was not enumerated
+in my statement of income as set opposite to inquiry No. 1.</p>
+
+<p>It was plain that that stranger had enabled me to make a goose of myself.
+It was very, very plain; and so I went out and hired another artist.
+By working on my vanity, the stranger had seduced me into declaring an
+income of two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars.  By law, one
+thousand dollars of this was exempt from income tax&mdash;the only relief I
+could see, and it was only a drop in the ocean.  At the legal five per
+cent., I must pay to the government the sum of ten thousand six hundred
+and fifty dollars, income tax!</p>
+
+<p>[I may remark, in this place, that I did not do it.]</p>
+
+<p>I am acquainted with a very opulent man, whose house is a palace, whose
+table is regal, whose outlays are enormous, yet a man who has no income,
+as I have often noticed by the revenue returns; and to him I went for
+advice in my distress.  He took my dreadful exhibition of receipts, he
+put on his glasses, he took his pen, and presto!&mdash;I was a pauper!  It was
+the neatest thing that ever was.  He did it simply by deftly manipulating
+the bill of "DEDUCTIONS."  He set down my "State, national, and municipal
+taxes" at so much; my "losses by shipwreck; fire, etc.," at so much; my
+"losses on sales of real estate"&mdash;on "live stock sold"&mdash;on "payments for
+rent of homestead"&mdash;on "repairs, improvements, interest"&mdash;on "previously
+taxed salary as an officer of the United States army, navy, revenue
+service," and other things.  He got astonishing "deductions" out of each
+and every one of these matters&mdash;each and every one of them.  And when he
+was done he handed me the paper, and I saw at a glance that during the
+year my income, in the way of profits, had been one thousand two hundred
+and fifty dollars and forty cents.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," said he, "the thousand dollars is exempt by law.  What you want to
+do is to go and swear this document in and pay tax on the two hundred and
+fifty dollars."</p>
+
+<p>[While he was making this speech his little boy Willie lifted a
+two-dollar greenback out of his vest pocket and vanished with it, and I would
+wager anything that if my stranger were to call on that little boy
+to-morrow he would make a false return of his income.]</p>
+
+<p>"Do you," said I, "do you always work up the 'deductions' after this
+fashion in your own case, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should say so!  If it weren't for those eleven saving clauses
+under the head of 'Deductions' I should be beggared every year to support
+this hateful and wicked, this extortionate and tyrannical government."</p>
+
+<p>This gentleman stands away up among the very best of the solid men of the
+city&mdash;the men of moral weight, of commercial integrity, of unimpeachable
+social spotlessness&mdash;and so I bowed to his example.  I went down to the
+revenue office, and under the accusing eyes of my old visitor I stood up
+and swore to lie after lie, fraud after fraud, villainy after villainy,
+till my soul was coated inches and inches thick with perjury, and my
+self-respect gone for ever and ever.</p>
+
+<p>But what of it?  It is nothing more than thousands of the richest and
+proudest, and most respected, honored, and courted men in America do
+every year.  And so I don't care.  I am not ashamed.  I shall simply,
+for the present, talk little and eschew fire-proof gloves, lest I fall
+into certain dreadful habits irrevocably.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br>
+
+
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