"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?"