He is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses in
homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with
a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all
possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his
portrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comes
along, whether he has anything against him or not....
Dan said:
“It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day
and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and
Shakespeare and those fellows.”
“Oh yes, it is--it is--Why, many's the time I've had to get up in
the night when it comes on me:
Whether we're on the sea or the land
We've all got to go at the word of command--
“Hey! how's that?”
A curious character was Cutter--a Long Island farmer with the obsession
of rhyme. In his old age, in an interview, he said:
“Mark was generally writing and he was glum. He would write what we were
doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:
“'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'
“Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing.”
Poor old Poet Lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew.
We may believe that Mark learned to be “glum” when he saw the Lariat
approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe, too, that he was
“generally writing.” He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta
during that five months and six to the Tribune. They would average about
two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or
something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all. To turn out
an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing
besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those
who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics.
That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which
he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and
despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last
year he was the most industrious of men.