CHAPTER I

Produced by David Widger

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 thatnothing

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

lastinterruption; 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 jacet hoc, ex-parte res,

Politicum e-conomico est.

The grandeur of these conceptions of the old poet, together with the

felicity of the wording which clothes them, and the sublimity of the

imagery whereby they are illustrated, have singled out that stanza,

and made it more celebrated than any that ever--

[“Now, not a word out of you--not a single word. Just state your bill

and relapse into impenetrable silence for ever and ever on these

premises. Nine hundred, dollars? Is that all? This check for the

amount will be honored at any respectable bank in America. What is that

multitude of people gathered in the street for? How?--'looking at the

lightning-rods!' Bless my life, did they never see any lightning-rods

before? Never saw 'such a stack of them on one establishment,' did I

understand you to say? I will step down and critically observe this

popular ebullition of ignorance.”]

THREE DAYS LATER.--We are all about worn out. For four-and-twenty hours

our bristling premises were the talk and wonder of the town. The

theaters languished, for their happiest scenic inventions were tame and

commonplace compared with my lightning-rods. Our street was blocked

night and day with spectators, and among them were many who came from

the country to see. It was a blessed relief on the second day when a

thunderstorm came up and the lightning began to “go for” my house, as the

historian Josephus quaintly phrases it. It cleared the galleries, so to

speak. In five minutes there was not a spectator within half a mile of

my place; but all the high houses about that distance away were full,

windows, roof, and all. And well they might be, for all the falling

stars and Fourth-of-July fireworks of a generation, put together and

rained down simultaneously out of heaven in one brilliant shower upon one

helpless roof, would not have any advantage of the pyrotechnic display

that was making my house so magnificently conspicuous in the general

gloom of the storm.

By actual count, the lightning struck at my establishment seven

hundred and sixty-four times in forty minutes, but tripped on one of

those faithful rods every time, and slid down the spiral-twist and shot

into the earth before it probably had time to be surprised at the way the

thing was done. And through all that bombardment only one patch of slates

was ripped up, and that was because, for a single instant, the rods in

the vicinity were transporting all the lightning they could possibly

accommodate. Well, nothing was ever seen like it since the world began.

For one whole day and night not a member of my family stuck his head out

of the window but he got the hair snatched off it as smooth as a

billiard-ball; and; if the reader will believe me, not one of us ever

dreamt of stirring abroad. But at last the awful siege came to an

end-because there was absolutely no more electricity left in the clouds

above us within grappling distance of my insatiable rods. Then I sallied

forth, and gathered daring workmen together, and not a bite or a nap did

we take till the premises were utterly stripped of all their terrific

armament except just three rods on the house, one on the kitchen, and one

on the barn--and, behold, these remain there even unto this day. And

then, and not till then, the people ventured to use our street again.

I will remark here, in passing, that during that fearful time I did not

continue my essay upon political economy. I am not even yet settled

enough in nerve and brain to resume it.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.--Parties having need of three thousand two

hundred and eleven feet of best quality zinc-plated spiral-twist

lightning-rod stuff, and sixteen hundred and thirty-one silver-tipped

points, all in tolerable repair (and, although much worn by use, still

equal to any ordinary emergency), can hear of a bargain by addressing

the publisher.

THE JUMPING FROG [written about 1865]

IN ENGLISH. THEN IN FRENCH. THEN CLAWED BACK INTO A CIVILIZED LANGUAGE

ONCE MORE BY PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL.

Even a criminal is entitled to fair play; and certainly when a man who

has done no harm has been unjustly treated, he is privileged to do his

best to right himself. My attention has just been called to an article

some three years old in a French Magazine entitled, 'Revue des Deux

Mondes' (Review of Some Two Worlds), wherein the writer treats of “Les

Humoristes Americaines” (These Humorists 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 I thank him with all

my heart; but then why should he go and spoil all his praise by one

unlucky experiment? What I refer to is this: he says my Jumping Frog is

a funny story, but still he can't see why it should ever really convulse

any one with laughter--and straightway proceeds to translate it into

French in order to prove to his nation that there is nothing so very

extravagantly funny about it. Just there is where my complaint

originates. He has not translated it at all; he has simply mixed it all

up; it is no more like the Jumping Frog when he gets through with it than

I am like a meridian of longitude. But my mere assertion is not proof;

wherefore I print the French version, that all may see that I do not

speak falsely; furthermore, in order that even the unlettered may know my

injury and give me their compassion, I have been at infinite pains and

trouble to retranslate this French version back into English; and to tell

the truth I have well-nigh worn myself out at it, having scarcely rested

from my work during five days and nights. I cannot speak the French

language, but I can translate very well, though not fast, I being

self-educated. I ask the reader to run his eye over the original English

version of the Jumping Frog, and then read the French or my

retranslation, and kindly take notice how the Frenchman has riddled the

grammar. I think it is the worst I ever saw; and yet the French are

called a polished nation. If I had a boy that put sentences together as

they do, I would polish him to some purpose. Without further

introduction, the Jumping Frog, as I originally wrote it, was as follows

[after it will be found the French version, and after the latter my

retranslation from the French]

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

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the

East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired

after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I

hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W.

Smiley is a myth that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he

only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him

of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death

with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it

should be useless to me. If that was the design, it succeeded.

I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the

dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed

that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness

and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up, and gave me

good day. I told him that a friend of mine had commissioned me to make

some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas

W. Smiley--Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, a young minister of the Gospel, who

he had heard was at one time resident of Angel's Camp. I added that if

Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley,

I would feel under many obligations to him.

Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his

chair, and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which

follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never

changed his voice from the gentle flowing key to which he tuned his

initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of

enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein

of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that,

so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny

about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired

its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in 'finesse.' I let him go

on in his own way, and never interrupted him once.

“Rev. Leonidas W. H'm, Reverend Le--well, there was a feller here, once

by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49--or maybe it was the

spring of '50--I don't recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me

think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume warn't

finished when he first come to the camp; but anyway, he was the

curiousest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever

see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't

he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit HIM--any

way just so's he got a bet, he was satisfied. But still he was lucky,

uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner. He was always ready and

laying for a chance; there couldn't be no solit'ry thing mentioned but

that feller'd offer to bet on it, and take ary side you please, as I was

just telling you. If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush or

you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd

bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a

chicken-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there was two birds setting on a

fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a

camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he

judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was too, and a good

man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet

you how long it would take him to get to--to wherever he was going to,

and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but

what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the

road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell you about

him. Why, it never made no difference to him--he'd bet on any thing--the

dangdest feller. Parson Walker's wife laid very sick once, for a good

while, and it seemed as if they warn't going to save her; but one morning

he come in, and Smiley up and asked him how she was, and he said she was

considerable better--thank the Lord for his inf'nite mercy--and coming on

so smart that with the blessing of Prov'dence she'd get well yet; and

Smiley, before he thought, says, 'Well, I'll resk two-and-a-half she

don't anyway.'

“Thish-yer Smiley had a mare--the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag,

but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster than

that--and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and

always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something

of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards' start,

and then pass her under way; but always at the fag end of the race she

get excited and desperate like, and come cavorting and straddling up,

and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and

sometimes out to one side among the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust

and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her

nose--and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near

as you could cipher it down.

“And he had a little small bull-pup, that to look at him you'd think he

warn't worth a cent but to set around and look ornery and lay for a

chance to steal something. But as soon as money was up on him he was a

different dog; his under-jaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'castle of

a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover and shine like the furnaces.

And a dog might tackle him and bully-rag him, and bite him, and throw him

over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew Jackson--which was the

name of the pup--Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was

satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else--and the bets being doubled

and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up;

and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j'int

of his hind leg and freeze to it--not chaw, you understand, but only just

grip and hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year.

Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till he harnessed a dog once

that didn't have no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off in a

circular saw, and when the thing had gone along far enough, and the money

was all up, and he come to make a snatch for his pet holt, he see in a

minute how he'd been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the

door, so to speak, and he 'peared surprised, and then he looked sorter

discouraged-like and didn't try no more to win the fight, and so he got

shucked out bad. He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was

broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn't no hind

legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight,

and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died. It was a good

pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if

he'd lived, for the stuff was in him and he had genius--I know it,

because he hadn't no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to

reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them

circumstances if he hadn't no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when

I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out.

“Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tomcats

and all them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't

fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog

one day, and took him home, and said he cal'lated to educate him; and so

he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn

that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He'd give him a

little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in

the air like a doughnut--see him turn one summerset, or maybe a couple,

if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a

cat. He got him up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in

practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could

see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do

'most anything--and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster

down here on this floor--Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog--and sing

out, 'Flies, Dan'l, flies!' and quicker'n you could wink he'd spring

straight up and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the

floor ag'in as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of

his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd

been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest

and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it

come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more

ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see.

Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it

come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red.

Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers

that had traveled and been everywheres all said he laid over any frog

that ever they see.

“Well, Smiley kep' the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to

fetch him down-town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller

--a stranger in the camp, he was--come acrost him with his box, and says:

“'What might it be that you've got in the box?'

“And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, 'It might be a parrot, or it

might be a canary, maybe, but it ain't--it's only just a frog.'

“And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round

this way and that, and says, 'H'm--so 'tis. Well, what's HE good for.

“'Well,' Smiley says, easy and careless, 'he's good enough for one thing,

I should judge--he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.

“The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look,

and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, 'Well,' he says,

'I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other

frog.'

“'Maybe you don't,' Smiley says. 'Maybe you understand frogs and maybe

you don't understand 'em; maybe you've had experience, and maybe you

ain't only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my opinion, and I'll

resk forty dollars 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.' And so the feller took the

box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set down to

wait.

“So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to himself and then

he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and

filled him full of quail-shot--filled him pretty near up to his chin--and

set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in

the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him

in, and give him to this feller and says:

“'Now, if you're ready, set him alongside of Dan'l, with his fore paws

just even with Dan'l's, and I'll give the word.' Then he says,

'One-two-three--git' and him and the feller touches up the frogs from

behind, and the new frog hopped off lively but Dan'l give a heave, and

hysted up his shoulders--so-like a Frenchman, but it warn't no use--he

couldn't budge; he was planted as solid as a church, and he couldn't no

more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised,

and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was

of course.

“The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at

the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder--so--at Dan'l, and

says again, very deliberate, 'Well,' he says, 'I don't see no p'ints about

that frog that's any better'n any other frog.'

“Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long

time, and at last he says, 'I do wonder what in the nation that frog

throw'd off for--I wonder if there ain't something the matter with him

--he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow.' And he ketched Dan'l by the

nap of the neck, and hefted him, and says, 'Why blame my cats if he don't

weigh five pound!' and turned him upside down and he belched out a double

handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man

--he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never

ketched him. And--”

[Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up

to see what was wanted.] And turning to me as he moved away, he said:

“Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy--I ain't going to be

gone a second.”

But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of

the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much

information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started

away.

At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me

and recommenced:

“Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no

tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and--”

However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about

the afflicted cow, but took my leave.

Now let the learned look upon this picture and say if iconoclasm can

further go:

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

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

LA GRENOUILLE SAUTEUSE DU COMTE DE CALAVERAS

“--Il y avait, une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim Smiley:

c'était dans l'hiver de 49, peut-être bien au printemps de 50, je ne me

reappelle pas exactement. Ce qui me fait croire que c'était l'un ou

l'autre, c'est que je me souviens que le grand bief n'était pas achevé

lorsqu'il arriva au camp pour la premiére fois, mais de toutes facons il

était l'homme le plus friand de paris qui se pût voir, pariant sur tout

ce qui se présentait, quand il pouvait trouver un adversaire, et, quand

n'en trouvait pas il passait du côté opposé. Tout ce qui convenait à

l'autre lui convenait; pourvu qu'il eût un pari, Smiley était satisfait.

Et il avait une chance! une chance inouie: presque toujours il gagnait.

It faut dire qu'il était toujours prêt à s'exposer, qu'on ne pouvait

mentionner la moindre chose sans que ce gaillard offrît de parier

là-dessus n'importe quoi et de prendre le côte que l'on voudrait, comme

je vous le disais tout à l'heure. S'il y avait des courses, vous le

trouviez riche ou ruiné à la fin; s'il y avait un combat de chiens, il

apportait son enjeu; il l'apportait pour un combat de chats, pour un

combat de coqs;--parbleu! si vous aviez vu deux oiseaux sur une haie il

vous aurait offert de parier lequel s'envolerait le premier, et s'il y

aviat 'meeting' au camp, il venait parier régulièrement pour le curé

Walker, qu'il jugeait être le meilleur prédicateur des environs, et qui

l'était en effet, et un brave homme. Il aurait rencontré une punaise de

bois en chemin, qu'il aurait parié sur le temps qu'il lui faudrait pour

aller où elle voudrait aller, et si vous l'aviez pris au mot, it aurait

suivi la punaise jusqu'au Mexique, sans se soucier d'aller si loin, ni du

temps qu'il y perdrait. Une fois la femme du curé Walker fut très malade

pendant longtemps, il semblait qu'on ne la sauverait pas; mais un matin le

curé arrive, et Smiley lui demande comment ella va et il dit qu'elle est

bien mieux, grâce a l'infinie miséricorde tellement mieux qu'avec la

bénédiction de la Providence elle s'en tirerait, et voilá que, sans y

penser, Smiley répond:--Eh bien! je gage deux et demi qu'elle mourra tout

de même.

“Ce Smiley avait une jument que les gars appelaient le bidet du quart

d'heure, mais seulement pour plaisanter, vous comprenez, parce que, bien

entendu, elle était plus vite que ca! Et il avait coutume de gagner de

l'argent avec cette bête, quoi-qu'elle fût poussive, cornarde, toujours

prise d'asthme, de coliques ou de consomption, ou de quelque chose

d'approchant. On lui donnait 2 ou 300 'yards' au départ, puis on la

dépassait sans peine; mais jamais à la fin elle ne manquait de

s'échauffer, de s'exaspérer et elle arrivait, s'écartant, se défendant,

ses jambes grêles en l'air devant les obstacles, quelquefois les évitant

et faisant avec cela plus de poussière qu'aucun cheval, plus de bruit

surtout avec ses éternumens et reniflemens.---crac! elle arrivait donc

toujours première d'une tête, aussi juste qu'on peut le mesurer. Et il

avait un petit bouledogue qui, à le voir, ne valait pas un sou; on aurait

cru que parier contre lui c'était voler, tant il était ordinaire; mais

aussitôt les enjeux faits, il devenait un autre chien. Sa mâchoire

inférieure commencait à ressortir comme un gaillard d'avant, ses dents se

découvcraient brillantes commes des fournaises, et un chien pouvait le

taquiner, l'exciter, le mordre, le jeter deux ou trois fois par-dessus

son épaule, André Jackson, c'était le nom du chien, André Jackson prenait

cela tranquillement, comme s'il ne se fût jamais attendu à autre chose,

et quand les paris étaient doublés et redoublés contre lui, il vous

saisissait l'autre chien juste à l'articulation de la jambe de derrière,

et il ne la lâchait plus, non pas qu'il la mâchât, vous concevez, mais il

s'y serait tenu pendu jusqu'à ce qu'on jetât l'éponge en l'air, fallût-il

attendre un an. Smiley gagnait toujours avec cette bête-là;

malheureusement ils ont fini par dresser un chien qui n'avait pas de

pattes de derrière, parce qu'on les avait sciées, et quand les choses

furent au point qu'il voulait, et qu'il en vint à se jeter sur son

morceau favori, le pauvre chien comprit en un instant qu'on s'était moqué

de lui, et que l'autre le tenait. Vous n'avez jamais vu personne avoir

l'air plus penaud et plus découragé; il ne fit aucun effort pour gagner

le combat et fut rudement secoué, de sorte que, regardant Smiley comme

pour lui dire:--Mon coeur est brisé, c'est ta faute; pourquoi m'avoir

livré à un chien qui n'a pas de pattes de derrière, puisque c'est par là

que je les bats?--il s'en alla en clopinant, et se coucha pour mourir.

Ah! c'était un bon chien, cet André Jackson, et il se serait fait un nom,

s'il avait vécu, car il y avait de l'etoffe en lui, il avait du génie,

je la sais, bien que de grandes occasions lui aient manqué; mais il est

impossible de supposer qu'un chien capable de se battre comme lui,

certaines circonstances étant données, ait manqué de talent. Je me sens

triste toutes les fois que je pense à son dernier combat et au dénoûment

qu'il a eu. Eh bien! ce Smiley nourrissait des terriers à rats, et des

coqs combat, et des chats, et toute sorte de choses, au point qu'il était

toujours en mesure de vous tenir tête, et qu'avec sa rage de paris on

n'avait plus de repos. Il attrapa un jour une grenouille et l'emporta

chez lui, disant qu'il prétendait faire son éducation; vous me croirez si

vous voulez, mais pendant trois mois il n'a rien fait que lui apprendre à

sauter dans une cour retirée de sa maison. Et je vous réponds qu'il avait

reussi. Il lui donnait un petit coup par derrière, et l'instant d'après

vous voyiez la grenouille tourner en l'air comme un beignet au-dessus de

la poêle, faire une culbute, quelquefois deux, lorsqu'elle était bien

partie, et retomber sur ses pattes comme un chat. Il l'avait dressée

dans l'art de gober des mouches, er l'y exercait continuellement, si bien

qu'une mouche, du plus loin qu'elle apparaissait, était une mouche

perdue. Smiley avait coutume de dire que tout ce qui manquait à une

grenouille, c'était l'éducation, qu'avec l'éducation elle pouvait faire

presque tout, et je le crois. Tenez, je l'ai vu poser Daniel Webster là

sur se plancher,--Daniel Webster était le nom de la grenouille,--et lui

chanter: Des mouches! Daniel, des mouches!--En un clin d'oeil, Daniel

avait bondi et saisi une mouche ici sur le comptoir, puis sauté de

nouveau par terre, où il restait vraiment à se gratter la tête avec sa

patte de derrière, comme s'il n'avait pas eu la moindre idée de sa

superiorité. Jamais vous n'avez grenouille vu de aussi modeste, aussi

naturelle, douee comme elle l'était! Et quand il s'agissait de sauter

purement et simplement sur terrain plat, elle faisait plus de chemin en

un saut qu'aucune bete de son espèce que vous puissiez connaître. Sauter

à plat, c'était son fort! Quand il s'agissait de cela, Smiley entassait

les enjeux sur elle tant qu'il lui, restait un rouge liard. Il faut le

reconnaitre, Smiley était monstrueusement fier de sa grenouille, et il en

avait le droit, car des gens qui avaient voyagé, qui avaient tout vu,

disaient qu'on lui ferait injure de la comparer à une autre; de facon que

Smiley gardait Daniel dans une petite boîte a claire-voie qu'il emportait

parfois à la Ville pour quelque pari.

“Un jour, un individu étranger au camp l'arrête aver sa boîte et lui

dit:--Qu'est-ce que vous avez donc serré là dedans?

“Smiley dit d'un air indifférent:--Cela pourrait être un perroquet ou un

serin, mais ce n'est rien de pareil, ce n'est qu'une grenouille.

“L'individu la prend, la regarde avec soin, la tourne d'un côté et de

l'autre puis il dit.--Tiens! en effet! A quoi estelle bonne?

“--Mon Dieu! répond Smiley, toujours d'un air dégagé, elle est bonne pour

une chose à mon avis, elle peut battre en sautant toute grenouille du

comté de Calaveras.

“L'individu reprend la boîte, l'examine de nouveau longuement, et la rend

à Smiley en disant d'un air délibéré:--Eh bien! je ne vois pas que cette

grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune grenouille.

“--Possible que vous ne le voyiez pas, dit Smiley, possible que vous vous

entendiez en grenouilles, possible que vous ne vous y entendez point,

possible que vous avez de l'expérience, et possible que vous ne soyez

qu'un amateur. De toute manière, je parie quarante dollars qu'elle

battra en sautant n'importe quelle grenouille du comté de Calaveras.

“L'individu réfléchit une seconde et dit comme attristé:--Je ne suis

qu'un étranger ici, je n'ai pas de grenouille; mais, si j'en

avais une, je tiendrais le pari.

“--Fort bien! répond Smiley. Rien de plus facile. Si vous voulez tenir

ma boîte une minute, j'irai vous chercher une grenouille.--Voilà donc

l'individu qui garde la boîte, qui met ses quarante dollars sur ceux de

Smiley et qui attend. Il attend assez longtemps, réflechissant tout

seul, et figurez-vous qu'il prend Daniel, lui ouvre la bouche de force at

avec une cuiller à thé l'emplit de menu plomb de chasse, mais l'emplit

jusqu'au menton, puis il le pose par terre. Smiley pendant ce temps

était à barboter dans une mare. Finalement il attrape une grenouille,

l'apporte à cet individu et dit:--Maintenant, si vous êtes prêt, mettez-la

tout contra Daniel, avec leurs pattes de devant sur la même ligne, et je

donnerai le signal; puis il ajoute:--Un, deux, trois, sautez!

“Lui et l'individu touchent leurs grenouilles par derrière, et la

grenouille neuve se met à sautiller, mais Daniel se soulève lourdement,

hausse les épaules ainsi, comme un Francais; à quoi bon? il ne pouvait

bouger, il était planté solide comma une enclume, il n'avancait pas plus

que si on l'eût mis à l'ancre. Smiley fut surpris et dégoûté, mais il ne

se doutait pas du tour, bien entendu. L'individu empoche l'argent, s'en

va, et en s'en allant est-ce qu'il ne donna pas un coup de pouce

par-dessus l'épaule, comma ca, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air

délibéré:--Eh bien! je ne vois pas qua cette grenouille ait rien de muiex

qu'une autre.

“Smiley se gratta longtemps la tête, les yeux fixés sur Daniel; jusqu'à

ce qu'enfin il dit:--Je me demande comment diable il se fait que cette

bête ait refusé . . . Est-ce qu'elle aurait quelque chose? . . . On

croirait qu'elle est enfleé.

“Il empoigne Daniel par la peau du cou, le souléve et dit:--Le loup me

croque, s'il ne pèse pas cinq livres.

“Il le retourne, et le malheureux crache deux poignées de plomb. Quand

Smiley reconnut ce qui en était, il fut comme fou. Vous le voyez d'ici

poser sa grenouille par terra et courir aprés cet individu, mais il ne le

rattrapa jamais, et ....”

[Translation of the above back from the French:]

THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS

It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim

Smiley; it was in the winter of '89, possibly well at the spring of '50,

I no me recollect not exactly. This which me makes to believe that it

was the one or the other, it is that I shall remember that the grand

flume is not achieved when he arrives at the camp for the first time, but

of all sides he was the man the most fond of to bet which one have seen,

betting upon all that which is presented, when he could find an

adversary; and when he not of it could not, he passed to the side

opposed. All that which convenienced to the other to him convenienced

also; seeing that he had a bet Smiley was satisfied. And he had a

chance! a chance even worthless; nearly always he gained. It must to say

that he was always near to himself expose, but one no could mention the

least thing without that this gaillard offered to bet the bottom, no

matter what, and to take the side that one him would, as I you it said

all at the hour (tout à l'heure). If it there was of races, you him find

rich or ruined at the end; if it, there is a combat of dogs, he bring his

bet; he himself laid always for a combat of cats, for a combat of cocks

--by-blue! If you have see two birds upon a fence, he you should have

offered of to bet which of those birds shall fly the first; and if there

is meeting at the camp (meeting au camp) he comes to bet regularly for

the curé Walker, which he judged to be the best predicator of the

neighborhood (prédicateur des environs) and which he was in effect, and a

brave man. He would encounter a bug of wood in the road, whom he will

bet upon the time which he shall take to go where she would go--and if

you him have take at the word, he will follow the bug as far as Mexique,

without himself caring to go so far; neither of the time which he there

lost. One time the woman of the cure Walker is very sick during long

time, it seemed that one not her saved not; but one morning the cure

arrives, and Smiley him demanded how she goes, and he said that she is

well better, grace to the infinite misery (lui demande comment elle va,

et il dit qu'elle est bien mieux, grâce a l'infinie miséricorde) so much

better that with the benediction of the Providence she herself of it

would pull out (elle s'en tirerait); and behold that without there

thinking Smiley responds: “Well, I gage two-and-half that she will die

all of same.”

This Smiley had an animal which the boys called the nag of the quarter of

hour, but solely for pleasantry, you comprehend, because, well

understand, she was more fast as that! [Now why that exclamation?--M. T.]

And it was custom of to gain of the silver with this beast,

notwithstanding she was poussive, cornarde, always taken of asthma, of

colics or of consumption, or something of approaching. One him would

give two or three hundred yards at the departure, then one him passed

without pain; but never at the last she not fail of herself échauffer,

of herself exasperate, and she arrives herself écartant, se defendant,

her legs greles in the air before the obstacles, sometimes them elevating

and making with this more of dust than any horse, more of noise above

with his eternumens and reniflemens--crac! she arrives then always first

by one head, as just as one can it measure. And he had a small bulldog

(bouledogue!) who, to him see, no value, not a cent; one would believe

that to bet against him it was to steal, so much he was ordinary; but as

soon as the game made, she becomes another dog. Her jaw inferior

commence to project like a deck of before, his teeth themselves discover

brilliant like some furnaces, and a dog could him tackle (le taquiner),

him excite, him murder (le mordre), him throw two or three times over his

shoulder, André Jackson--this was the name of the dog--André Jackson

takes that tranquilly, as if he not himself was never expecting other

thing, and when the bets were doubled and redoubled against him, he you

seize the other dog just at the articulation of the leg of behind, and he

not it leave more, not that he it masticate, you conceive, but he himself

there shall be holding during until that one throws the sponge in the

air, must he wait a year. Smiley gained always with this beast-là;

unhappily they have finished by elevating a dog who no had not of feet of

behind, because one them had sawed; and when things were at the point

that he would, and that he came to himself throw upon his morsel

favorite, the poor dog comprehended in an instant that he himself was

deceived in him, and that the other dog him had. You no have never seen

person having the air more penaud and more discouraged; he not made no

effort to gain the combat, and was rudely shucked.

Eh bien! this Smiley nourished some terriers à rats, and some cocks of

combat, and some cats, and all sorts of things; and with his rage of

betting one no had more of repose. He trapped one day a frog and him

imported with him (et l'emporta chez lui) saying that he pretended to

make his education. You me believe if you will, but during three months

he not has nothing done but to him apprehend to jump (apprendre à sauter)

in a court retired of her mansion (de sa maison). And I you respond that

he have succeeded. He him gives a small blow by behind, and the instant

after you shall see the frog turn in the air like a grease-biscuit, make

one summersault, sometimes two, when she was well started, and refall

upon his feet like a cat. He him had accomplished in the art of to

gobble the flies (gober des mouches), and him there exercised continually

--so well that a fly at the most far that she appeared was a fly lost.

Smiley had custom to say that all which lacked to a frog it was the

education, but with the education she could do nearly all--and I him

believe. Tenez, I him have seen pose Daniel Webster there upon this

plank--Daniel Webster was the name of the frog--and to him sing, “Some

flies, Daniel, some flies!”--in a flash of the eye Daniel had bounded

and seized a fly here upon the counter, then jumped anew at

the earth, where he rested truly to himself scratch the head with his

behind foot, as if he no had not the least idea of his superiority.

Never you not have seen frog as modest, as natural, sweet as she was.

And when he himself agitated to jump purely and simply upon plain earth,

she does more ground in one jump than any beast of his species than you

can know. To jump plain-this was his strong. When he himself agitated

for that, Smiley multiplied the bets upon her as long as there to him

remained a red. It must to know, Smiley was monstrously proud of his

frog, and he of it was right, for some men who were traveled, who had all

seen, said that they to him would be injurious to him compare, to another

frog. Smiley guarded Daniel in a little box latticed which he carried

bytimes to the village for some bet.

One day an individual stranger at the camp him arrested with his box and

him said:

“What is this that you have them shut up there within?”

Smiley said, with an air indifferent:

“That could be a paroquet, or a syringe (ou un serin), but this no is

nothing of such, it not is but a frog.”

The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side

and from the other, then he said:

“Tiens! in effect!--At what is she good?”

“My God!” respond Smiley, always with an air disengaged, “she is good for

one thing, to my notice (à mon avis), she can batter in jumping (elle peut

battre en sautant) all frogs of the county of Calaveras.”

The individual retook the box, it examined of new longly, and it rendered

to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate:

“Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each

frog.” (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune

grenouille.) [If that isn't grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no

judge.--M. T.]

“Possible that you not it saw not,” said Smiley, “possible that you--you

comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;

possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but

an amateur. Of all manner (De toute manière) I bet forty dollars that

she batter in jumping no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras.”

The individual reflected a second, and said like sad:

“I not am but a stranger here, I no have not a frog; but if I of it had

one, I would embrace the bet.”

“Strong well!” respond Smiley; “nothing of more facility. If you will

hold my box a minute, I go you to search a frog (j'irai vous chercher).”

Behold, then, the individual, who guards the box, who puts his forty

dollars upon those of Smiley, and who attends (et qui attend). He

attended enough long times, reflecting all solely. And figure you that

he takes Daniel, him opens the mouth by force and with a teaspoon him

fills with shot of the hunt, even him fills just to the chin, then he him

puts by the earth. Smiley during these times was at slopping in a swamp.

Finally he trapped (attrape) a frog, him carried to that individual, and

said:

“Now if you be ready, put him all against Daniel with their before feet

upon the same line, and I give the signal”--then he added: “One, two,

three--advance!”

Him and the individual touched their frogs by behind, and the frog new

put to jump smartly, but Daniel himself lifted ponderously, exalted the

shoulders thus, like a Frenchman--to what good? he not could budge, he

is planted solid like a church, he not advance no more than if one him had

put at the anchor.

Smiley was surprised and disgusted, but he no himself doubted not of the

turn being intended (mais il ne se doutait pas du tour, bien entendu).

The individual empocketed the silver, himself with it went, and of it

himself in going is it that he no gives not a jerk of thumb over the

shoulder--like that--at the poor Daniel, in saying with his air

deliberate--(L'individu empoche l'argent, s'en va et en s'en allant

est-ce qu'il ne donne pas un coup de pouce par-dessus l'épaule, comme ça,

au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air délibéré):

“Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another.”

Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel,

until that which at last he said:

“I me demand how the devil it makes itself that this beast has refused.

Is it that she had something? One would believe that she is stuffed.”

He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said:

“The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds:”

He him reversed and the unhappy belched two handfuls of shot (et le

malheureux, etc.). When Smiley recognized how it was, he was like mad.

He deposited his frog by the earth and ran after that individual, but he

not him caught never.

Such is the Jumping Frog, to the distorted French eye. I claim that I

never put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium

tremens in my life. And what has a poor foreigner like me done, to be

abused and misrepresented like this? When I say, “Well, I don't see no

p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” is it kind,

is it just, for this Frenchman to try to make it appear that I said, “Eh

bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog”?

I have no heart to write more. I never felt so about anything before.

HARTFORD, March, 1875.

JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE--[Written about 1871.]

The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a

correspondent who posted him as a Radical:--“While he was writing

the first word, the middle, dotting his i's, crossing his t's, and

punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was

saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood.”--Exchange.

I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my

health, and so I went down to Tennessee, and got a berth on the Morning

Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate editor. When I went on

duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair

with his feet on a pine table. There was another pine table in the room

and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers

and scraps and sheets of manuscript. There was a wooden box of sand,

sprinkled with cigar stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door

hanging by its upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black

cloth frock-coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and

neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal-ring, a standing

collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief with the ends

hanging down. Date of costume about 1848. He was smoking a cigar, and

trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his

locks a good deal. He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was

concocting a particularly knotty editorial. He told me to take the

exchanges and skim through them and write up the “Spirit of the Tennessee

Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of

interest.

I wrote as follows:

SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS

The editors of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake evidently labor under a

misapprehension with regard to the Ballyhack railroad. It is not

the object of the company to leave Buzzardville off to one side.

On the contrary, they consider it one of the most important points

along the line, and consequently can have no desire to slight it.

The gentlemen of the Earthquake will, of course, take pleasure in

making the correction.

John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville

Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, arrived in the city

yesterday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House.

We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs Morning Howl has

fallen into the error of supposing that the election of Van Werter

is not an established fact, but he will have discovered his mistake

before this reminder reaches him, no doubt. He was doubtless misled

by incomplete election returns.

It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is endeavoring

to contract with some New York gentlemen to pave its well-nigh

impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement. The Daily Hurrah

urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate

success.

I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance,

alteration, or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He

ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was

easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang up and said:

“Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those

cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such

gruel as that? Give me the pen!”

I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plow

through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was

in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window,

and marred the symmetry of my ear.

“Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano--he

was due yesterday.” And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and

fired--Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith's aim,

who was just taking a second chance and he crippled a stranger. It was

me. Merely a finger shot off.

Then the chief editor went on with his erasure; and interlineations.

Just as he finished them a hand grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the

explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did

no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my

teeth out.

“That stove is utterly ruined,” said the chief editor.

I said I believed it was.

“Well, no matter--don't want it this kind of weather. I know the man

that did it. I'll get him. Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be

written.”

I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations

till its mother wouldn't have known it if it had had one. It now read as

follows:

SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS

The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently

endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another

of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most

glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack

railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side

originated in their own fulsome brains--or rather in the settlings

which they regard as brains. They had better swallow this lie if

they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding

they so richly deserve.

That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of

Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.

We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning

Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van

Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to

disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and

elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more

gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and

holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades

his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood,

calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.

Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement--it wants a jail and a

poorhouse more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed

of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop, and that mustard-plaster of a

newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! The crawling insect, Buckner, who

edits the Hurrah, is braying about his business with his customary

imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.

“Now that is the way to write--peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk

journalism gives me the fan-tods.”

About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash,

and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved out of range

--I began to feel in the way.

The chief said, “That was the Colonel, likely. I've been expecting him

for two days. He will be up now right away.”

He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward with

a dragoon revolver in his hand.

He said, “Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this

mangy sheet?”

“You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is

gone. I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Colonel

Blatherskite Tecumseh?”

“Right, Sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are at

leisure we will begin.”

“I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual

Development in America' to finish, but there is no hurry. Begin.”

Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief

lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel's bullet ended its career in the

fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel's left shoulder was clipped a

little. They fired again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my

share, a shot in the arm. At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded

slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped. I then said, I believed I would

go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter, and I had a

delicacy about participating in it further. But both gentlemen begged me

to keep my seat, and assured me that I was not in the way.

They then talked about the elections and the crops while they reloaded,

and I fell to tying up my wounds. But presently they opened fire again

with animation, and every shot took effect--but it is proper to remark

that five out of the six fell to my share. The sixth one mortally

wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine humor, that he would have to

say good morning now, as he had business uptown. He then inquired the

way to the undertaker's and left.

The chief turned to me and said, “I am expecting company to dinner, and

shall have to get ready. It will be a favor to me if you will read proof

and attend to the customers.”

I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was

too bewildered by the fusillade that was still ringing in my ears to

think of anything to say.

He continued, “Jones will be here at three--cowhide him. Gillespie will

call earlier, perhaps--throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be

along about four--kill him. That is all for today, I believe. If you

have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police--give

the chief inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in

the drawer--ammunition there in the corner--lint and bandages up there in

the pigeonholes. In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon,

downstairs. He advertises--we take it out in trade.”

He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I had been

through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were

gone from me. Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window.

Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took

the job off my hands. In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill

of fare, I had lost my scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson,

left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in

the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs,

politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their

weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of

steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief

arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends. Then

ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one

either, could describe. People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up,

thrown out of the window. There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy,

with a confused and frantic war-dance glimmering through it, and then all

was over. In five minutes there was silence, and the gory chief and I

sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around

us.

He said, “You'll like this place when you get used to it.”

I said, “I'll have to get you to excuse me; I think maybe I might write

to suit you after a while; as soon as I had had some practice and learned

the language I am confident I could. But, to speak the plain truth, that

sort of energy of expression has its inconveniences, and a man is liable

to interruption.

“You see that yourself. Vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the

public, no doubt, but then I do not like to attract so much attention as

it calls forth. I can't write with comfort when I am interrupted so much

as I have been to-day. I like this berth well enough, but I don't like

to be left here to wait on the customers. The experiences are novel,

I grant you, and entertaining, too, after a fashion, but they are not

judiciously distributed. A gentleman shoots at you through the window

and cripples me; a bombshell comes down the stove-pipe for your

gratification and sends the stove door down my throat; a friend drops in

to swap compliments with you, and freckles me with bullet-holes till my

skin won't hold my principles; you go to dinner, and Jones comes with his

cowhide, Gillespie throws me out of the window, Thompson tears all my

clothes off, and an entire stranger takes my scalp with the easy freedom

of an old acquaintance; and in less than five minutes all the blackguards

in the country arrive in their war-paint, and proceed to scare the rest

of me to death with their tomahawks. Take it altogether, I never had

such a spirited time in all my life as I have had to-day. No; I like

you, and I like your calm unruffled way of explaining things to the

customers, but you see I am not used to it. The Southern heart is too

impulsive; Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger. The

paragraphs which I have written to-day, and into whose cold sentences

your masterly hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennesseean

journalism, will wake up another nest of hornets. All that mob of

editors will come--and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for

breakfast. I shall have to bid you adieu. I decline to be present at

these festivities. I came South for my health, I will go back on the

same errand, and suddenly. Tennesseean journalism is too stirring for

me.”

After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the

hospital.

THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY--[Written about 1865]

Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim--though, if you will

notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James

in your Sunday-school books. It was strange, but still it was true, that this

one was called Jim.

He didn't have any sick mother, either--a sick mother who was pious and

had the consumption, and would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at

rest but for the strong love she bore her boy, and the anxiety she felt

that the world might be harsh and cold toward him when she was gone.

Most bad boys in the Sunday books are named James, and have sick mothers,

who teach them to say, “Now, I lay me down,” etc., and sing them to sleep

with sweet, plaintive voices, and then kiss them good night, and kneel

down by the bedside and weep. But it was different with this fellow.

He was named Jim, and there wasn't anything the matter with his mother

--no consumption, nor anything of that kind. She was rather stout than

otherwise, and she was not pious; moreover, she was not anxious on Jim's

account. She said if he were to break his neck it wouldn't be much loss.

She always spanked Jim to sleep, and she never kissed him good night; on

the contrary, she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him.

Once this little bad boy stole the key of the pantry, and slipped in

there and helped himself to some jam, and filled up the vessel with tar,

so that his mother would never know the difference; but all at once a

terrible feeling didn't come over him, and something didn't seem to

whisper to him, “Is it right to disobey my mother? Isn't it sinful to do

this? Where do bad little boys go who gobble up their good kind mother's

jam?” and then he didn't kneel down all alone and promise never to be

wicked any more, and rise up with a light, happy heart, and go and tell

his mother all about it, and beg her forgiveness, and be blessed by her

with tears of pride and thankfulness in her eyes. No; that is the way

with all other bad boys in the books; but it happened otherwise with this

Jim, strangely enough. He ate that jam, and said it was bully, in his

sinful, vulgar way; and he put in the tar, and said that was bully also,

and laughed, and observed “that the old woman would get up and snort”

when she found it out; and when she did find it out, he denied knowing

anything about it, and she whipped him severely, and he did the crying

himself. Everything about this boy was curious--everything turned out

differently with him from the way it does to the bad Jameses in the

books.

Once he climbed up in Farmer Acorn's apple tree to steal apples, and the

limb didn't break, and he didn't fall and break his arm, and get torn by

the farmer's great dog, and then languish on a sickbed for weeks, and

repent and become good. Oh, no; he stole as many apples as he wanted and

came down all right; and he was all ready for the dog, too, and knocked

him endways with a brick when he came to tear him. It was very strange

--nothing like it ever happened in those mild little books with marbled

backs, and with pictures in them of men with swallow-tailed coats and

bell-crowned hats, and pantaloons that are short in the legs, and women

with the waists of their dresses under their arms, and no hoops on.

Nothing like it in any of the Sunday-school books.

Once he stole the teacher's penknife, and, when he was afraid it would be

found out and he would get whipped, he slipped it into George Wilson's

cap--poor Widow Wilson's son, the moral boy, the good little boy of the

village, who always obeyed his mother, and never told an untruth, and was

fond of his lessons, and infatuated with Sunday-school. And when the

knife dropped from the cap, and poor George hung his head and blushed,

as if in conscious guilt, and the grieved teacher charged the theft upon

him, and was just in the very act of bringing the switch down upon his

trembling shoulders, a white-haired, improbable justice of the peace did

not suddenly appear in their midst, and strike an attitude and say,

“Spare this noble boy--there stands the cowering culprit! I was passing

the school door at recess, and, unseen myself, I saw the theft

committed!” And then Jim didn't get whaled, and the venerable justice

didn't read the tearful school a homily, and take George by the hand and

say such a boy deserved to be exalted, and then tell him to come and make his

home with him, and sweep out the office, and make fires, and run errands,

and chop wood, and study law, and help his wife do household labors, and

have all the balance of the time to play, and get forty cents a month, and

be happy. No; it would have happened that way in the books, but didn't

happen that way to Jim. No meddling old clam of a justice dropped in to

make trouble, and so the model boy George got thrashed, and Jim was glad

of it because, you know, Jim hated moral boys. Jim said he was “down on

them milksops.” Such was the coarse language of this bad, neglected boy.

But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim was the time he went

boating on Sunday, and didn't get drowned, and that other time that he

got caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn't get

struck by lightning. Why, you might look, and look, all through the

Sunday-school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never

come across anything like this. Oh, no; you would find that all the bad

boys who go boating on Sunday invariably get drowned; and all the bad

boys who get caught out in storms when they are fishing on Sunday

infallibly get struck by lightning. Boats with bad boys in them always

upset on Sunday, and it always storms when bad boys go fishing on the

Sabbath. How this Jim ever escaped is a mystery to me.

This Jim bore a charmed life--that must have been the way of it. Nothing

could hurt him. He even gave the elephant in the menagerie a plug of

tobacco, and the elephant didn't knock the top of his head off with his

trunk. He browsed around the cupboard after essence-of peppermint, and

didn't make a mistake and drink aqua fortis. He stole his father's gun

and went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn't shoot three or four of his

fingers off. He struck his little sister on the temple with his fist

when he was angry, and she didn't linger in pain through long summer

days, and die with sweet words of forgiveness upon her lips that

redoubled the anguish of his breaking heart. No; she got over it. He

ran off and went to sea at last, and didn't come back and find himself

sad and alone in the world, his loved ones sleeping in the quiet

churchyard, and the vine-embowered home of his boyhood tumbled down and

gone to decay. Ah, no; he came home as drunk as a piper, and got into

the station-house the first thing.

And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them

all with an ax one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and

rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his

native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the

legislature.

So you see there never was a bad James in the Sunday-school books that

had such a streak of luck as this sinful Jim with the charmed life.

THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY--[Written about 1865]

Once there was a good little boy by the name of Jacob Blivens. He always

obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and unreasonable their demands

were; and he always learned his book, and never was late at

Sabbath-school. He would not play hookey, even when his sober judgment

told him it was the most profitable thing he could do. None of the other

boys could ever make that boy out, he acted so strangely. He wouldn't

lie, no matter how convenient it was. He just said it was wrong to lie,

and that was sufficient for him. And he was so honest that he was simply

ridiculous. The curious ways that that Jacob had, surpassed everything.

He wouldn't play marbles on Sunday, he wouldn't rob birds' nests, he

wouldn't give hot pennies to organ-grinders' monkeys; he didn't seem to

take any interest in any kind of rational amusement. So the other boys

used to try to reason it out and come to an understanding of him, but

they couldn't arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. As I said before,

they could only figure out a sort of vague idea that he was “afflicted,”

and so they took him under their protection, and never allowed any harm

to come to him.

This good little boy read all the Sunday-school books; they were his

greatest delight. This was the whole secret of it. He believed in the

good little boys they put in the Sunday-school 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 little uncomfortable

sometimes when he reflected that the good little boys always died. He

loved to live, you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about

being a Sunday-school-book boy. He knew it was not healthy to be good.

He knew it was more fatal than consumption to be so supernaturally good

as the boys in the books were; he knew that none of them had ever been

able to stand it long, and it pained him to think that if they put him in

a book he wouldn't ever see it, or even if they did get the book out

before he died it wouldn't be popular without any picture of his funeral

in the back part of it. It couldn't be much of a Sunday-school book that

couldn't tell about the advice he gave to the community when he was

dying. So at last, of course, he had to make up his mind to do the best

he could under the circumstances--to live right, and hang on as long as

he could, and have his dying speech all ready when his time came.

But somehow nothing ever went right with the good little boy; nothing

ever turned out with him the way it turned out with the good little boys

in the books. They always had a good time, and the bad boys had the

broken legs; but in his case there was a screw loose somewhere, and it

all happened just the other way. When he found Jim Blake stealing

apples, and went under the tree to read to him about the bad little boy

who fell out of a neighbor's apple tree and broke his arm, Jim fell out

of the tree, too, but he fell on him and broke his arm, and Jim wasn't

hurt at all. Jacob couldn't understand that. There wasn't anything in

the books like it.

And once, when some bad boys pushed a blind man over in the mud, and

Jacob ran to help him up and receive his blessing, the blind man did not

give him any blessing at all, but whacked him over the head with his

stick and said he would like to catch him shoving him again, and then

pretending to help him up. This was not in accordance with any of the

books. Jacob looked them all over to see.

One thing that Jacob wanted to do was to find a lame dog that hadn't any

place to stay, and was hungry and persecuted, and bring him home and pet

him and have that dog's imperishable gratitude. And at last he found one

and was happy; and he brought him home and fed him, but when he was going

to pet him the dog flew at him and tore all the clothes off him except

those that were in front, and made a spectacle of him that was

astonishing. He examined authorities, but he could not understand the

matter. It was of the same breed of dogs that was in the books, but it

acted very differently. Whatever this boy did he got into trouble. The

very things the boys in the books got rewarded for turned out to be about

the most unprofitable things he could invest in.

Once, when he was on his way to Sunday-school, he saw some bad boys

starting off pleasuring in a sailboat. He was filled with consternation,

because he knew from his reading that boys who went sailing on Sunday

invariably got drowned. So he ran out on a raft to warn them, but a log

turned with him and slid him into the river. A man got him out pretty

soon, and the doctor pumped the water out of him, and gave him a fresh

start with his bellows, but he caught cold and lay sick abed nine weeks.

But the most unaccountable thing about it was that the bad boys in the

boat had a good time all day, and then reached home alive and well in the

most surprising manner. Jacob Blivens said there was nothing like these

things in the books. He was perfectly dumfounded.

When he got well he was a little discouraged, but he resolved to keep on

trying anyhow. He knew that so far his experiences wouldn't do to go in

a book, but he hadn't yet reached the allotted term of life for good

little boys, and he hoped to be able to make a record yet if he could

hold on till his time was fully up. If everything else failed he had his

dying speech to fall back on.

He examined his authorities, and found that it was now time for him to go

to sea as a cabin-boy. He called on a ship-captain and made his

application, and when the captain asked for his recommendations he

proudly drew out a tract and pointed to the word, “To Jacob Blivens, from

his affectionate teacher.” But the captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and

he said, “Oh, that be blowed! that wasn't any proof that he knew how to

wash dishes or handle a slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn't want him.”

This was altogether the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to

Jacob in all his life. A compliment from a teacher, on a tract, had

never failed to move the tenderest emotions of ship-captains, and open

the way to all offices of honor and profit in their gift, it never had in

any book that ever HE had read. He could hardly believe his senses.

This boy always had a hard time of it. Nothing ever came out according

to the authorities with him. At last, one day, when he was around

hunting up bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot of them in the old

iron-foundry fixing up a little joke on fourteen or fifteen dogs, which

they had tied together in long procession, and were going to ornament

with empty nitroglycerin cans made fast to their tails. Jacob's heart

was touched. He sat down on one of those cans (for he never minded

grease when duty was before him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by

the collar, and turned his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones. But just

at that moment Alderman McWelter, full of wrath, stepped in. All the bad

boys ran away, but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and began

one of those stately little Sunday-school-book speeches which always

commence with “Oh, sir!” in dead opposition to the fact that no boy, good

or bad, ever starts a remark with “Oh, sir.” But the alderman never

waited to hear the rest. He took Jacob Blivens by the ear and turned him

around, and hit him a whack in the rear with the flat of his hand; and in

an instant that good little boy shot out through the roof and soared away

toward the sun, with the fragments of those fifteen dogs stringing after

him like the tail of a kite. And there wasn't a sign of that alderman or

that old iron-foundry left on the face of the earth; and, as for young

Jacob Blivens, he never got a chance to make his last dying speech after

all his trouble fixing it up, unless he made it to the birds; because,

although the bulk of him came down all right in a tree-top in an

adjoining county, the rest of him was apportioned around among four

townships, and so they had to hold five inquests on him to find out

whether he was dead or not, and how it occurred. You never saw a boy

scattered so.--[This glycerin catastrophe is borrowed from a floating

newspaper item, whose author's name I would give if I knew it.--M. T.]

Thus perished the good little boy who did the best he could, but didn't

come out according to the books. Every boy who ever did as he did

prospered except him. His case is truly remarkable. It will probably

never be accounted for.

A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE--[Written about 1865]

THOSE EVENING BELLS

BY THOMAS MOORE

Those evening bells! those evening bells!

How many a tale their music tells

Of youth, and home, and that sweet time

When last I heard their soothing chime.

Those joyous hours are passed away;

And many a heart that then was gay,

Within the tomb now darkly dwells,

And hears no more those evening bells.

And so 'twill be when I am gone

That tuneful peal will still ring on;

While other bards shall walk these dells,

And sing your praise, sweet evening bells.

THOSE ANNUAL BILLS

BY MARK TWAIN

These annual bills! these annual bills!

How many a song their discord trills

Of “truck” consumed, enjoyed, forgot,

Since I was skinned by last year's lot!

Those joyous beans are passed away;

Those onions blithe, O where are they?

Once loved, lost, mourned--now vexing ILLS

Your shades troop back in annual bills!

And so 'twill be when I'm aground

These yearly duns will still go round,

While other bards, with frantic quills,

Shall damn and damn these annual bills!

NIAGARA [ Written about 1871.]

Niagara Falls is a most enjoyable place of resort. The hotels are

excellent, and the prices not at all exorbitant. The opportunities for

fishing are not surpassed in the country; in fact, they are not even

equaled elsewhere. Because, in other localities, certain places in the

streams are much better than others; but at Niagara one place is just as

good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere, and

so there is no use in your walking five miles to fish, when you can

depend on being just as unsuccessful nearer home. The advantages of this

state of things have never heretofore been properly placed before the

public.

The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant

and none of them fatiguing. When you start out to “do” the Falls you

first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of

looking down from a precipice into the narrowest part of the Niagara

River. A railway “cut” through a hill would be as comely if it had the

angry river tumbling and foaming through its bottom. You can descend a

staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at the edge of

the water. After you have done it, you will wonder why you did it; but

you will then be too late.

The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the

little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids--how first

one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows and then the

other, and at what point it was that her smokestack toppled overboard,

and where her planking began to break and part asunder--and how she did

finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the incredible feat of

traveling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in seventeen

minutes, I have really forgotten which. But it was very extraordinary,

anyhow. It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the

story nine times in succession to different parties, and never miss a

word or alter a sentence or a gesture.

Then you drive over to Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between

the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and

the chances of having the railway-train overhead smashing down onto you.

Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together,

they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.

On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of

photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an

ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your

solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the

light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime

Niagara; and a great many people have the incredible effrontery or the

native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.

Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately

pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of country

cousins, all smiling vacantly, and all disposed in studied and

uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, and all looming up in their

awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of

that majestic presence whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose

voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds, who was

monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this sackful of small

reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's

unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages

after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood-relations, the

other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust.

There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display

one's marvelous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a

sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it.

When you have examined the stupendous Horseshoe Fall till you are

satisfied you cannot improve on it, you return to America by the new

Suspension Bridge, and follow up the bank to where they exhibit the Cave

of the Winds.

Here I followed instructions, and divested myself of all my clothing, and

put on a waterproof jacket and overalls. This costume is picturesque,

but not beautiful. A guide, similarly dressed, led the way down a flight

of winding stairs, which wound and wound, and still kept on winding long

after the thing ceased to be a novelty, and then terminated long before

it had begun to be a pleasure. We were then well down under the

precipice, but still considerably above the level of the river.

We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our persons

shielded from destruction by a crazy wooden railing, to which I clung

with both hands--not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to.

Presently the descent became steeper and the bridge flimsier, and sprays

from the American Fall began to rain down on us in fast increasing sheets

that soon became blinding, and after that our progress was mostly in the

nature of groping. Now a furious wind began to rush out from behind the

waterfall, which seemed determined to sweep us from the bridge, and

scatter us on the rocks and among the torrents below. I remarked that I

wanted to go home; but it was too late. We were almost under the

monstrous wall of water thundering down from above, and speech was in

vain in the midst of such a pitiless crash of sound.

In another moment the guide disappeared behind the deluge, and, bewildered

by the thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by the arrowy

tempest of rain, I followed. All was darkness. Such a mad storming,

roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed my ears

before. I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my back.

The world seemed going to destruction. I could not see anything, the

flood poured down savagely. I raised my head, with open mouth, and the

most of the American cataract went down my throat. If I had sprung a

leak now I had been lost. And at this moment I discovered that the

bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a foothold to the slippery and

precipitous rocks. I never was so scared before and survived it. But we

got through at last, and emerged into the open day, where we could stand

in front of the laced and frothy and seething world of descending water,

and look at it. When I saw how much of it there was, and how fearfully

in earnest it was, I was sorry I had gone behind it.

The noble Red Man has always been a friend and darling of mine. I love

to read about him in tales and legends and romances. I love to read of

his inspired sagacity, and his love of the wild free life of mountain and

forest, and his general nobility of character, and his stately

metaphorical manner of speech, and his chivalrous love for the dusky

maiden, and the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements.

Especially the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements. When I

found the shops at Niagara Falls full of dainty Indian beadwork, and

stunning moccasins, and equally stunning toy figures representing human

beings who carried their weapons in holes bored through their arms and

bodies, and had feet shaped like a pie, I was filled with emotion.

I knew that now, at last, I was going to come face to face with the noble

Red Man.

A lady clerk in a shop told me, indeed, that all her grand array of

curiosities were made by the Indians, and that they were plenty about the

Falls, and that they were friendly, and it would not be dangerous to

speak to them. And sure enough, as I approached the bridge leading over

to Luna Island, I came upon a noble Son of the Forest sitting under a

tree, diligently at work on a bead reticule. He wore a slouch hat and

brogans, and had a short black pipe in his mouth. Thus does the baneful

contact with our effeminate civilization dilute the picturesque pomp

which is so natural to the Indian when far removed from us in his native

haunts. I addressed the relic as follows:

“Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a-Whack happy? Does the great

Speckled Thunder sigh for the war-path, or is his heart contented with

dreaming of the dusky maiden, the Pride of the Forest? Does the mighty

Sachem yearn to drink the blood of his enemies, or is he satisfied to

make bead reticules for the pappooses of the paleface? Speak, sublime

relic of bygone grandeur--venerable ruin, speak!”

The relic said:

“An' is it mesilf, Dennis Hooligan, that ye'd be takin' for a dirty

Injin, ye drawlin', lantern-jawed, spider-legged divil! By the piper

that played before Moses, I'll ate ye!”

I went away from there.

By and by, in the neighborhood of the Terrapin Tower, I came upon a

gentle daughter of the aborigines in fringed and beaded buckskin

moccasins and leggins, seated on a bench with her pretty wares about her.

She had just carved out a wooden chief that had a strong family

resemblance to a clothes-pin, and was now boring a hole through his

abdomen to put his bow through. I hesitated a moment, and then addressed

her:

“Is the heart of the forest maiden heavy? Is the Laughing Tadpole

lonely? Does she mourn over the extinguished council-fires of her race,

and the vanished glory of her ancestors? Or does her sad spirit wander

afar toward the hunting-grounds whither her brave Gobbler-of-the-

Lightnings is gone? Why is my daughter silent? Has she ought against

the paleface stranger?”

The maiden said:

“Faix, an' is it Biddy Malone ye dare to be callin' names? Lave this, or

I'll shy your lean carcass over the cataract, ye sniveling blaggard!”

I adjourned from there also.

“Confound these Indians!” I said. “They told me they were tame; but, if

appearances go for anything, I should say they were all on the warpath.”

I made one more attempt to fraternize with them, and only one. I came

upon a camp of them gathered in the shade of a great tree, making wampum

and moccasins, and addressed them in the language of friendship:

“Noble Red Men, Braves, Grand Sachems, War Chiefs, Squaws, and High

Muck-a-Mucks, the paleface from the land of the setting sun greets you!

You, Beneficent Polecat--you, Devourer of Mountains--you, Roaring

Thundergust--you, Bully Boy with a Glass eye--the paleface from beyond

the great waters greets you all! War and pestilence have thinned your

ranks and destroyed your once proud nation. Poker and seven-up, and a

vain modern expense for soap, unknown to your glorious ancestors, have

depleted your purses. Appropriating, in your simplicity, the property of

others has gotten you into trouble. Misrepresenting facts, in your

simple innocence, has damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper.

Trading for forty-rod whisky, to enable you to get drunk and happy and

tomahawk your families, has played the everlasting mischief with the

picturesque pomp of your dress, and here you are, in the broad light of

the nineteenth century, gotten up like the ragtag and bobtail of the

purlieus of New York. For shame! Remember your ancestors! Recall their

mighty deeds! Remember Uncas!--and Red jacket! and Hole in the Day!--and

Whoopdedoodledo! Emulate their achievements! Unfurl yourselves under my

banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes--”

“Down wid him!” “Scoop the blaggard!” “Burn him!” “Hang him!”

“Dhround him!”

It was the quickest operation that ever was. I simply saw a sudden flash

in the air of clubs, brickbats, fists, bead-baskets, and moccasins--a

single flash, and they all appeared to hit me at once, and no two of them

in the same place. In the next instant the entire tribe was upon me.

They tore half the clothes off me; they broke my arms and legs; they gave

me a thump that dented the top of my head till it would hold coffee like

a saucer; and, to crown their disgraceful proceedings and add insult to

injury, they threw me over the Niagara Falls, and I got wet.

About ninety or a hundred feet from the top, the remains of my vest

caught on a projecting rock, and I was almost drowned before I could get

loose. I finally fell, and brought up in a world of white foam at the

foot of the Fall, whose celled and bubbly masses towered up several inches

above my head. Of course I got into the eddy. I sailed round and

round in it forty-four times--chasing a chip and gaining on it--each

round trip a half-mile--reaching for the same bush on the bank forty-four

times, and just exactly missing it by a hair's-breadth every time.

At last a man walked down and sat down close to that bush, and put a pipe

in his mouth, and lit a match, and followed me with one eye and kept the

other on the match, while he sheltered it in his hands from the wind.

Presently a puff of wind blew it out. The next time I swept around he

said:

“Got a match?”

“Yes; in my other vest. Help me out, please.”

“Not for Joe.”

When I came round again, I said:

“Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a drowning man, but will

you explain this singular conduct of yours?”

“With pleasure. I am the coroner. Don't hurry on my account. I can

wait for you. But I wish I had a match.”

I said: “Take my place, and I'll go and get you one.”

He declined. This lack of confidence on his part created a coldness

between us, and from that time forward I avoided him. It was my idea,

in case anything happened to me, to so time the occurrence as to throw my

custom into the hands of the opposition coroner on the American side.

At last a policeman came along, and arrested me for disturbing the peace

by yelling at people on shore for help. The judge fined me, but I had the

advantage of him. My money was with my pantaloons, and my pantaloons

were with the Indians.

Thus I escaped. I am now lying in a very critical condition. At least I

am lying anyway---critical or not critical. I am hurt all over, but I

cannot tell the full extent yet, because the doctor is not done taking

inventory. He will make out my manifest this evening. However, thus far

he thinks only sixteen of my wounds are fatal. I don't mind the others.

Upon regaining my right mind, I said:

“It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the beadwork and

moccasins for Niagara Falls, doctor. Where are they from?”

“Limerick, my son.”

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS--[Written about 1865.]

“MORAL STATISTICIAN.”--I don't want any of your statistics; I took your

whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You

are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much

his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he

wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal

practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking

coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of

wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. And you are always figuring out how

many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of

wearing expansive hoops, etc., etc., etc. You never see more than one

side of the question. You are blind to the fact that most old men in

America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they

ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and

survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet

grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how

much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking

in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would

save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost

in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can

save money by denying yourself all the little vicious enjoyments for

fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it

to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money

can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life;

therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use

of accumulating cash? It won't do for you to say that you can use it to

better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in

supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who

have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you

stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and

hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor

wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you;

and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in

the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give

the revenue officers a 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, stirrin'

cretur, always doin' somethin', and no man can say he ever see him

do anything by halvers. Preachin was his nateral gait, but he

warn't a man to lay back and twidle his thumbs because there didn't

happen to be nothin' doin' in his own especial line--no, sir, he was a

man who would meander forth and stir up something for hisself. His

last acts was to go his pile on “Kings-and” (calklatin' to fill, but

which he didn't fill), when there was a “flush” out agin him, and

naterally, you see, he went under. And so he was cleaned out as you

may say, and he struck the home-trail, cheerful but flat broke. I

knowed this talonted man in Arkansaw, and if you would print this

humbly tribute to his gorgis abilities, you would greatly obleege

his onhappy friend.

HE DONE HIS LEVEL BEST

Was he a mining on the flat--

He done it with a zest;

Was he a leading of the choir--

He done his level best.

If he'd a reg'lar task to do,

He never took no rest;

Or if 'twas off-and-on--the same--

He done his level best.

If he was preachin' on his beat,

He'd tramp from east to west,

And north to south-in cold and heat

He done his level best.

He'd yank a sinner outen (Hades),**

And land him with the blest;

Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,

And do his level best.

**Here I have taken a slight liberty with the original MS. “Hades”

does not make such good meter as the other word of one syllable, but

it sounds better.

He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,

And dance and drink and jest,

And lie and steal--all one to him--

He done his level best.

Whate'er this man was sot to do,

He done it with a zest;

No matter WHAT his contract was,

HE'D DO HIS LEVEL BEST.

Verily, this man WAS gifted with “gorgis abilities,” and it is a

happiness to me to embalm the memory of their luster in these columns.

If it were not that the poet crop is unusually large and rank in

California this year, I would encourage you to continue writing, Simon

Wheeler; but, as it is, perhaps it might be too risky in you to enter

against so much opposition.

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

par.

“MELTON MOWBRAY,” Dutch Flat.--This correspondent sends a lot of

doggerel, and says it has been regarded as very good in Dutch Flat. I

give a specimen verse:

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold;

And the sheen of his spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.**

**This piece of pleasantry, published in a San Francisco paper, was

mistaken by the country journals for seriousness, and many and loud

were the denunciations of the ignorance of author and editor, in not

knowing that the lines in question were “written by Byron.”

There, that will do. That may be very good Dutch Flat poetry, but it

won't do in the metropolis. It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like

buttermilk gurgling from a jug. What the people ought to have is

something spirited--something like “Johnny Comes Marching Home.” However,

keep on practising, and you may succeed yet. There is genius in you, but

too much blubber.

“ST. CLAIR HIGGINS.” Los Angeles.--“My life is a failure; I have

adored, wildly, madly, and she whom I love has turned coldly from me

and shed her affections upon another. What would you advise me to

do?”

You should set your affections on another also--or on several, if there

are enough to go round. Also, do everything you can to make your former

flame unhappy. There is an absurd idea disseminated in novels, that the

happier a girl is with another man, the happier it makes the old lover

she has blighted. Don't allow yourself to believe any such nonsense as

that. The more cause that girl finds to regret that she did not marry

you, the more comfortable you will feel over it. It isn't poetical, but

it is mighty sound doctrine.

“ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.--“If it would take a cannon-ball

3 and 1/3 seconds to travel four miles, and 3 and 3/8 seconds to

travel the next four, and 3 and 5/8 to travel the next four, and if

its rate of progress continued to diminish in the same ratio, how

long would it take it to go fifteen hundred million miles?”

I don't know.

“AMBITIOUS LEARNER,” Oakland.--Yes; you are right America was not

discovered by Alexander Selkirk.

“DISCARDED LOVER.”--“I loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha

Howard, and intended to marry her. Yet, during my temporary absence

at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones. Is my happiness to

be thus blasted for life? Have I no redress?”

Of course you have. All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.

The intention and not the act constitutes crime--in other words,

constitutes the deed. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend

it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and

meaning no insult, it is not an insult. If you discharge a pistol

accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no

murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him,

but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the intention

constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder. Ergo, if you had

married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you

would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage

could not be complete without the intention. And ergo, in the strict

spirit of the law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and

didn't do it, you are married to her all the same--because, as I said

before, the intention constitutes the crime. It is as clear as day that

Edwitha is your wife, and your redress lies in taking a club and

mutilating Jones with it as much as you can. Any man has a right to

protect his own wife from the advances of other men. But you have

another alternative--you were married to Edwitha first, because of your

deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her for bigamy, in

subsequently marrying Jones. But there is another phase in this

complicated case: You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently,

according to law, she is your wife--there is no getting around that; but

she didn't marry you, and if she never intended to marry you, you are not

her husband, of course. Ergo, in marrying Jones, she was guilty of

bigamy, because she was the wife of another man at the time; which is all

very well as far as it goes--but then, don't you see, she had no other

husband when she married Jones, and consequently she was not guilty of

bigamy. Now, according to this view of the case, Jones married a

spinster, who was a widow at the same time and another man's wife at the

same time, and yet who had no husband and never had one, and never had

any intention of getting married, and therefore, of course, never had

been married; and by the same reasoning you are a bachelor, because you

have never been any one's husband; and a married man, because you have a

wife living; and to all intents and purposes a widower, because you have

been deprived of that wife; and a consummate ass for going off to Benicia

in the first place, while things were so mixed. And by this time I have

got myself so tangled up in the intricacies of this extraordinary case

that I shall have to give up any further attempt to advise you--I might

get confused and fail to make myself understood. I think I could take up

the argument where I left off, and by following it closely awhile,

perhaps I could prove to your satisfaction, either that you never existed

at all, or that you are dead now, and consequently don't need the

faithless Edwitha--I think I could do that, if it would afford you any

comfort.

“ARTHUR AUGUSTUS.”--No; you are wrong; that is the proper way to throw a

brickbat or a tomahawk; but it doesn't answer so well for a bouquet; you

will hurt somebody if you keep it up. Turn your nosegay upside down,

take it by the stems, and toss it with an upward sweep. Did you ever

pitch quoits? that is the idea. The practice of recklessly heaving

immense solid bouquets, of the general size and weight of prize cabbages,

from the dizzy altitude of the galleries, is dangerous and very

reprehensible. Now, night before last, at the Academy of Music, just

after Signorina ____ had finished that exquisite melody, “The Last Rose of

Summer,” one of these floral pile-drivers came cleaving down through the

atmosphere of applause, and if she hadn't deployed suddenly to the right,

it would have driven her into the floor like a shinglenail. Of course

that bouquet was well meant; but how would you like to have been the

target? A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as

you don't try to knock her down with it.

“YOUNG MOTHER.”--And so you think a baby is a thing of beauty and a joy

forever? Well, the idea is pleasing, but not original; every cow thinks

the same of its own calf. Perhaps the cow may not think it so elegantly,

but still she thinks it nevertheless. I honor the cow for it. We all

honor this touching maternal instinct wherever we find it, be it in the

home of luxury or in the humble cow-shed. But really, madam, when I

come to examine the matter in all its bearings, I find that the

correctness of your assertion does not assert itself in all cases.

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded

as a thing of beauty; and inasmuch as babyhood spans but three short

years, no baby is competent to be a joy “forever.” It pains me thus to

demolish two-thirds of your pretty sentiment in a single sentence; but

the position I hold in this chair requires that I shall not permit you to

deceive and mislead the public with your plausible figures of speech.

I know a female baby, aged eighteen months, in this city, which cannot

hold out as a “joy” twenty-four hours on a stretch, let alone “forever.”

And it possesses some of the most remarkable eccentricities of character

and appetite that have ever fallen under my notice. I will set down here

a statement of this infant's operations (conceived, planned, and carried

out by itself, and without suggestion or assistance from its mother or

any one else), during a single day; and what I shall say can be

substantiated by the sworn testimony of witnesses.

It commenced by eating one dozen large blue-mass pills, box and all; then

it fell down a flight of stairs, and arose with a blue and purple knot on

its forehead, after which it proceeded in quest of further refreshment

and amusement. It found a glass trinket ornamented with brass-work

--smashed up and ate the glass, and then swallowed the brass.

Then it drank about twenty drops of laudanum, and more than a dozen

tablespoonfuls of strong spirits of camphor. The reason why it took no

more laudanum was because there was no more to take. After this it lay

down on its back, and shoved five or six inches of a silver-headed

whalebone cane down its throat; got it fast there, and it was all its

mother could do to pull the cane out again, without pulling out some of

the child with it. Then, being hungry for glass again, it broke up

several wine glasses, and fell to eating and swallowing the fragments,

not minding a cut or two. Then it ate a quantity of butter, pepper,

salt, and California matches, actually taking a spoonful of butter, a

spoonful of salt, a spoonful of pepper, and three or four lucifer matches

at each mouthful. (I will remark here that this thing of beauty likes

painted German lucifers, and eats all she can get of them; but she

prefers California matches, which I regard as a compliment to our home

manufactures of more than ordinary value, coming, as it does, from one

who is too young to flatter.) Then she washed her head with soap and

water, and afterward ate what soap was left, and drank as much of the

suds as she had room for; after which she sallied forth and took the cow

familiarly by the tail, and got kicked heels over head. At odd times

during the day, when this joy forever happened to have nothing particular

on hand, she put in the time by climbing up on places, and falling down

off them, uniformly damaging her self in the operation. As young as she

is, she speaks many words tolerably distinctly; and being plainspoken in

other respects, blunt and to the point, she opens conversation with all

strangers, male or female, with the same formula, “How do, Jim?” Not being

familiar with the ways of children, it is possible that I have

been magnifying into matter of surprise things which may not strike any

one who is familiar with infancy as being at all astonishing. However, I

cannot believe that such is the case, and so I repeat that my report of

this baby's performances is strictly true; and if any one doubts it,

I can produce the child. I will further engage that she will devour

anything that is given her (reserving to myself only the right to exclude

anvils), and fall down from any place to which she may be elevated

(merely stipulating that her preference for alighting on her head shall

be respected, and, therefore, that the elevation chosen shall be high

enough to enable her to accomplish this to her satisfaction). But I find

I have wandered from my subject; so, without further argument, I will

reiterate my conviction that not all babies are things of beauty and joys

forever.

“ARITHMETICUS.” Virginia, Nevada.--“I am an enthusiastic student of

mathematics, and it is so vexatious to me to find my progress

constantly impeded by these mysterious arithmetical technicalities.

Now do tell me what the difference is between geometry and

conchology?”

Here you come again with your arithmetical conundrums, when I am

suffering death with a cold in the head. If you could have seen the

expression of scorn that darkened my countenance a moment ago, and was

instantly split from the center in every direction like a fractured

looking-glass by my last sneeze, you never would have written that

disgraceful question. Conchology is a science which has nothing to do

with mathematics; it relates only to shells. At the same time, however,

a man who opens oysters for a hotel, or shells a fortified town, or sucks

eggs, is not, strictly speaking, a conchologist--a fine stroke of sarcasm

that, but it will be lost on such an unintellectual clam as you. Now

compare conchology and geometry together, and you will see what the

difference is, and your question will be answered. But don't torture me

with any more arithmetical horrors until you know I am rid of my cold. I

feel the bitterest animosity toward you at this moment--bothering me in

this way, when I can do nothing but sneeze and rage and snort

pocket-handkerchiefs to atoms. If I had you in range of my nose now

I would blow your brains out.

TO RAISE POULTRY

--[Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a

complimentary membership upon the author. Written about 1870.]

Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the

subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready

sympathy in my breast. Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study

with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of

seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of

raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer

matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty

night by insinuating the end of a warm board under their heels. By the

time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry

than any one individual in all the section round about there. The very

chickens came to know my talent by and by. The youth of both sexes

ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that came to crow,

“remained to pray,” when I passed by.

I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but

think that a few hints from me might be useful to the society. The two

methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in

the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other

for winter. In the one case you start out with a friend along about

eleven o'clock on a summer's night (not later, because in some states

--especially in California and Oregon--chickens always rouse up just at

midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according to the ease or

difficulty they experience in getting the public waked up), and your

friend carries with him a sack. Arrived at the henroost (your

neighbor's, not your own), you light a match and hold it under first one

and then another pullet's nose until they are willing to go into that bag

without making any trouble about it. You then return home, either taking

the bag with you or leaving it behind, according as circumstances shall

dictate. N. B.--I have seen the time when it was eligible and

appropriate to leave the sack behind and walk off with considerable

velocity, without ever leaving any word where to send it.

In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your

friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you

carry a long slender plank. This is a frosty night, understand. Arrived

at the tree, or fence, or other henroost (your own if you are an idiot),

you warm the end of your plank in your friend's fire vessel, and then

raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering chicken's foot.

If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly

return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and step out and take up

quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before

the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question in our minds as

it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not really and

deliberately committing suicide in the second degree. [But you enter

into a contemplation of these legal refinements subsequently-- not then.]

When you wish to raise a fine, large, donkey-voiced Shanghai rooster, you

do it with a lasso, just as you would a bull. It is because he must be choked,

and choked effectually, too. It is the only good, certain way,

for whenever he mentions a matter which he is cordially interested in,

the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that he secures somebody else's

immediate attention to it too, whether it be day or night.

The Black Spanish is an exceedingly fine bird and a costly one.

Thirty-five dollars is the usual figure, and fifty a not uncommon price

for a specimen. Even its eggs are worth from a dollar to a dollar and a

half apiece, and yet are so unwholesome that the city physician seldom or

never orders them for the workhouse. Still I have once or twice procured

as high as a dozen at a time for nothing, in the dark of the moon. The

best way to raise the Black Spanish fowl is to go late in the evening and

raise coop and all. The reason I recommend this method is that, the

birds being so valuable, the owners do not permit them to roost around

promiscuously, but put them in a coop as strong as a fireproof safe and

keep it in the kitchen at night. The method I speak of is not always a

bright and satisfying success, and yet there are so many little articles

of VERTU about a kitchen, that if you fail on the coop you can generally

bring away something else. I brought away a nice steel trap one night,

worth ninety cents.

But what is the use in my pouring out my whole intellect on this subject?

I have shown the Western New York Poultry Society that they have taken to

their bosom a party who is not a spring chicken by any means, but a man

who knows all about poultry, and is just as high up in the most efficient

methods of raising it as the president of the institution himself.

I thank these gentlemen for the honorary membership they have conferred

upon me, and shall stand at all times ready and willing to testify my

good feeling and my official zeal by deeds as well as by this hastily

penned advice and information. Whenever they are ready to go to raising

poultry, let them call for me any evening after eleven o'clock, and I shall be

on hand promptly.

EXPERIENCE OF THE McWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP [Written about 1878.]

[As related to the author of this book by Mr. McWilliams, a pleasant New

York gentleman whom the said author met by chance on a journey.]

Well, to go back to where I was before I digressed to explain to you how

that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup,[Diphtheria D.W.]

was ravaging the town and driving all mothers mad with terror, I called

Mrs. McWilliams's attention to little Penelope, and said:

“Darling, I wouldn't let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were

you.”

“Precious, where is the harm in it?” said she, but at the same time

preparing to take away the stick--for women cannot receive even the most

palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women.

I replied:

“Love, it is notorious that pine is the least nutritious wood that a

child can eat.”

My wife's hand paused, in the act of taking the stick, and returned

itself to her lap. She bridled perceptibly, and said:

“Hubby, you know better than that. You know you do. Doctors all say

that the turpentine in pine wood is good for weak back and the kidneys.”

“Ah--I was under a misapprehension. I did not know that the child's

kidneys and spine were affected, and that the family physician had

recommended--”

“Who said the child's spine and kidneys were affected?”

“My love, you intimated it.”

“The idea! I never intimated anything of the kind.”

“Why, my dear, it hasn't been two minutes since you said--”

“Bother what I said! I don't care what I did say. There isn't any harm

in the child's chewing a bit of pine stick if she wants to, and you know

it perfectly well. And she shall chew it, too. So there, now!”

“Say no more, my dear. I now see the force of your reasoning, and I will

go and order two or three cords of the best pine wood to-day. No child

of mine shall want while I--”

“Oh, please go along to your office and let me have some peace. A body

can never make the simplest remark but you must take it up and go to

arguing and arguing and arguing till you don't know what you are talking

about, and you never do.”

“Very well, it shall be as you say. But there is a want of logic in your

last remark which--”

However, she was gone with a flourish before I could finish, and had

taken the child with her. That night at dinner she confronted me with a

face as white as a sheet:

“Oh, Mortimer, there's another! Little Georgi Gordon is taken.”

“Membranous croup?”

“Membranous croup.”

“Is there any hope for him?”

“None in the wide world. Oh, what is to become of us!”

By and by a nurse brought in our Penelope to say good night and offer the

customary prayer at the mother's knee. In the midst of “Now I lay me

down to sleep,” she gave a slight cough! My wife fell back like one

stricken with death. But the next moment she was up and brimming with

the activities which terror inspires.

She commanded that the child's crib be removed from the nursery to our

bedroom; and she went along to see the order executed. She took me with

her, of course. We got matters arranged with speed. A cot-bed was put

up in my wife's dressing room for the nurse. But now Mrs. McWilliams

said we were too far away from the other baby, and what if he were to

have the symptoms in the night--and she blanched again, poor thing.

We then restored the crib and the nurse to the nursery and put up a bed

for ourselves in a room adjoining.

Presently, however, Mrs. McWilliams said suppose the baby should catch it

from Penelope? This thought struck a new panic to her heart, and the

tribe of us could not get the crib out of the nursery again fast enough

to satisfy my wife, though she assisted in her own person and well-nigh

pulled the crib to pieces in her frantic hurry.

We moved down-stairs; but there was no place there to stow the nurse, and

Mrs. McWilliams said the nurse's experience would be an inestimable help.

So we returned, bag and baggage, to our own bedroom once more, and felt a

great gladness, like storm-buffeted birds that have found their nest

again.

Mrs. McWilliams sped to the nursery to see how things were going on

there. She was back in a moment with a new dread. She said:

“What CAN make Baby sleep so?”

I said:

“Why, my darling, Baby always sleeps like a graven image.”

“I know. I know; but there's something peculiar about his sleep now.

He seems to--to--he seems to breathe so regularly. Oh, this is

dreadful.”

“But, my dear, he always breathes regularly.”

“Oh, I know it, but there's something frightful about it now. His nurse

is too young and inexperienced. Maria shall stay there with her, and be

on hand if anything happens.”

“That is a good idea, but who will help YOU?”

“You can help me all I want. I wouldn't allow anybody to do anything but

myself, anyhow, at such a time as this.”

I said I would feel mean to lie abed and sleep, and leave her to watch

and toil over our little patient all the weary night. But she reconciled

me to it. So old Maria departed and took up her ancient quarters in the

nursery.

Penelope coughed twice in her sleep.

“Oh, why don't that doctor come! Mortimer, this room is too warm. This

room is certainly too warm. Turn off the register-quick!”

I shut it off, glancing at the thermometer at the same time, and

wondering to myself if 70 was too warm for a sick child.

The coachman arrived from down-town now with the news that our physician

was ill and confined to his bed. Mrs. McWilliams turned a dead eye upon

me, and said in a dead voice:

“There is a Providence in it. It is foreordained. He never was sick

before. Never. We have not been living as we ought to live, Mortimer.

Time and time again I have told you so. Now you see the result. Our

child will never get well. Be thankful if you can forgive yourself; I

never can forgive myself.”

I said, without intent to hurt, but with heedless choice of words, that I

could not see that we had been living such an abandoned life.

“Mortimer! Do you want to bring the judgment upon Baby, too!”

Then she began to cry, but suddenly exclaimed:

“The doctor must have sent medicines!”

I said:

“Certainly. They are here. I was only waiting for you to give me a

chance.”

“Well do give them to me! Don't you know that every moment is precious

now? But what was the use in sending medicines, when he knows that the

disease is incurable?”

I said that while there was life there was hope.

“Hope! Mortimer, you know no more what you are talking about than the

child unborn. If you would--As I live, the directions say give one

teaspoonful once an hour! Once an hour!--as if we had a whole year

before us to save the child in! Mortimer, please hurry. Give the poor

perishing thing a tablespoonful, and try to be quick!”

“Why, my dear, a tablespoonful might--”

“Don't drive me frantic! . . . There, there, there, my precious, my

own; it's nasty bitter stuff, but it's good for Nelly--good for mother's

precious darling; and it will make her well. There, there, there, put

the little head on mamma's breast and go to sleep, and pretty soon--oh,

I know she can't live till morning! Mortimer, a tablespoonful every

half-hour will--Oh, the child needs belladonna, too; I know she does--and

aconite. Get them, Mortimer. Now do let me have my way. You know

nothing about these things.”

We now went to bed, placing the crib close to my wife's pillow. All this

turmoil had worn upon me, and within two minutes I was something more

than half asleep. Mrs. McWilliams roused me:

“Darling, is that register turned on?”

“No.”

“I thought as much. Please turn it on at once. This room is cold.”

I turned it on, and presently fell asleep again. I was aroused once

more:

“Dearie, would you mind moving the crib to your side of the bed? It is

nearer the register.”

I moved it, but had a collision with the rug and woke up the child. I

dozed off once more, while my wife quieted the sufferer. But in a little

while these words came murmuring remotely through the fog of my

drowsiness:

“Mortimer, if we only had some goose grease--will you ring?”

I climbed dreamily out, and stepped on a cat, which responded with a

protest and would have got a convincing kick for it if a chair had not

got it instead.

“Now, Mortimer, why do you want to turn up the gas and wake up the child

again?”

“Because I want to see how much I am hurt, Caroline.”

“Well, look at the chair, too--I have no doubt it is ruined. Poor cat,

suppose you had--”

“Now I am not going to suppose anything about the cat. It never would

have occurred if Maria had been allowed to remain here and attend to

these duties, which are in her line and are not in mine.”

“Now, Mortimer, I should think you would be ashamed to make a remark like

that. It is a pity if you cannot do the few little things I ask of you

at such an awful time as this when our child--”

“There, there, I will do anything you want. But I can't raise anybody

with this bell. They're all gone to bed. Where is the goose grease?”

“On the mantelpiece in the nursery. If you'll step there and speak to

Maria--”

I fetched the goose grease and went to sleep again. Once more I was

called:

“Mortimer, I so hate to disturb you, but the room is still too cold for

me to try to apply this stuff. Would you mind lighting the fire? It is

all ready to touch a match to.”

I dragged myself out and lit the fire, and then sat down disconsolate.

“Mortimer, don't sit there and catch your death of cold. Come to bed.”

As I was stepping in she said:

“But wait a moment. Please give the child some more of the medicine.”

Which I did. It was a medicine which made a child more or less lively;

so my wife made use of its waking interval to strip it and grease it all

over with the goose oil. I was soon asleep once more, but once more I

had to get up.

“Mortimer, I feel a draft. I feel it distinctly. There is nothing so

bad for this disease as a draft. Please move the crib in front of the

fire.”

I did it; and collided with the rug again, which I threw in the fire.

Mrs. McWilliams sprang out of bed and rescued it and we had some words.

I had another trifling interval of sleep, and then got up, by request,

and constructed a flax-seed poultice. This was placed upon the child's

breast and left there to do its healing work.

A wood-fire is not a permanent thing. I got up every twenty minutes and

renewed ours, and this gave Mrs. McWilliams the opportunity to shorten

the times of giving the medicines by ten minutes, which was a great

satisfaction to her. Now and then, between times, I reorganized the

flax-seed poultices, and applied sinapisms and other sorts of blisters

where unoccupied places could be found upon the child. Well, toward

morning the wood gave out and my wife wanted me to go down cellar and get

some more. I said:

“My dear, it is a laborious job, and the child must be nearly warm

enough, with her extra clothing. Now mightn't we put on another layer of

poultices and--”

I did not finish, because I was interrupted. I lugged wood up from below

for some little time, and then turned in and fell to snoring as only a

man can whose strength is all gone and whose soul is worn out. Just at

broad daylight I felt a grip on my shoulder that brought me to my senses

suddenly. My wife was glaring down upon me and gasping. As soon as she

could command her tongue she said:

“It is all over! All over! The child's perspiring! What shall we do?”

“Mercy, how you terrify me! I don't know what we ought to do. Maybe if

we scraped her and put her in the draft again--”

“Oh, idiot! There is not a moment to lose! Go for the doctor.

Go yourself. Tell him he must come, dead or alive.”

I dragged that poor sick man from his bed and brought him. He looked at

the child and said she was not dying. This was joy unspeakable to me,

but it made my wife as mad as if he had offered her a personal affront.

Then he said the child's cough was only caused by some trifling

irritation or other in the throat. At this I thought my wife had a mind

to show him the door. Now the doctor said he would make the child cough

harder and dislodge the trouble. So he gave her something that sent her

into a spasm of coughing, and presently up came a little wood splinter or

so.

“This child has no membranous croup,” said he. “She has been chewing a

bit of pine shingle or something of the kind, and got some little slivers

in her throat. They won't do her any hurt.”

“No,” said I, “I can well believe that. Indeed, the turpentine that is

in them is very good for certain sorts of diseases that are peculiar to

children. My wife will tell you so.”

But she did not. She turned away in disdain and left the room; and since

that time there is one episode in our life which we never refer to.

Hence the tide of our days flows by in deep and untroubled serenity.

[Very few married men have such an experience as McWilliams's, and so the

author of this book thought that maybe the novelty of it would give it a

passing interest to the reader.]

MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE

I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen--an unusually smart

child, I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper

scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in

the community. It did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too. I was a

printer's “devil,” and a progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me

on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars a year in advance

--five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, and

unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be

gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the

paper judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try! Higgins was the editor on

the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found

an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could

not longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend

ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore. He had

concluded he wouldn't. The village was full of it for several days,

but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine opportunity.

I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and then

illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden

type with a jackknife--one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into

the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water

with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was

densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a

publication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other

worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting

matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece

of gratuitous rascality and “see him squirm.”

I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the “Burial of

Sir John Moore”--and a pretty crude parody it was, too.

Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously--not because they

had done anything to deserve, but merely because I thought it was my duty

to make the paper lively.

Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day, the

gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb of

the first water, and the “loudest” dressed man in the state. He was an

inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy “poetry” for the

journal, about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed,

“To MARY IN H--l,” meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But while

setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I

regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I compressed it into a

snappy footnote at the bottom--thus: “We will let this thing pass, just

this once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly

that we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth when he

wants to commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other

medium than the columns of this journal!”

The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much

attention as those playful trifles of mine.

For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand--a novelty it had not

experienced before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped in with

a double-barreled shotgun early in the forenoon. When he found that it

was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the damage, he simply

pulled my ears and went away; but he threw up his situation that night

and left town for good. The tailor came with his goose and a pair of

shears; but he despised me, too, and departed for the South that night.

The two lampooned citizens came with threats of libel, and went away

incensed at my insignificance. The country editor pranced in with a

war-whoop next day, suffering for blood to drink; but he ended by

forgiving me cordially and inviting me down to the drug store to wash

away all animosity in a friendly bumper of “Fahnestock's Vermifuge.”

It was his little joke. My uncle was very angry when he got back

--unreasonably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had given the

paper, and considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to

have been uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so

wonderfully escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head

shot off.

But he softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had

actually booked the unparalleled number of thirty-three new subscribers,

and had the vegetables to show for it, cordwood, cabbage, beans, and

unsalable turnips enough to run the family for two years!

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK--[Written about 1869.]

It is seldom pleasant to tell on oneself, but some times it is a sort of

relief to a man to make a confession. I wish to unburden my mind now,

and yet I almost believe that I am moved to do it more because I long to

bring censure upon another man than because I desire to pour balm upon my

wounded heart. (I don't know what balm is, but I believe it is the

correct expression to use in this connection--never having seen any

balm.) You may remember that I lectured in Newark lately for the young

gentlemen of the-----Society? I did at any rate. During the afternoon

of that day I was talking with one of the young gentlemen just referred

to, and he said he had an uncle who, from some cause or other, seemed to

have grown permanently bereft of all emotion. And with tears in his

eyes, this young man said, “Oh, if I could only see him laugh once more!

Oh, if I could only see him weep!” I was touched. I could never

withstand distress.

I said: “Bring him to my lecture. I'll start him for you.”

“Oh, if you could but do it! If you could but do it, all our family

would bless you for evermore--for he is so very dear to us. Oh, my

benefactor, can you make him laugh? can you bring soothing tears to those

parched orbs?”

I was profoundly moved. I said: “My son, bring the old party round.

I have got some jokes in that lecture that will make him laugh if there

is any laugh in him; and if they miss fire, I have got some others that

will make him cry or kill him, one or the other.” Then the young man

blessed me, and wept on my neck, and went after his uncle. He placed him

in full view, in the second row of benches, that night, and I began on

him. I tried him with mild jokes, then with severe ones; I dosed him

with bad jokes and riddled him with good ones; I fired old stale jokes

into him, and peppered him fore and aft with red-hot new ones; I warmed

up to my work, and assaulted him on the right and left, in front and

behind; I fumed and sweated and charged and ranted till I was hoarse and

sick and frantic and furious; but I never moved him once--I never started

a smile or a tear! Never a ghost of a smile, and never a suspicion of

moisture! I was astounded. I closed the lecture at last with one

despairing shriek--with one wild burst of humor, and hurled a joke of

supernatural atrocity full at him!

Then I sat down bewildered and exhausted.

The president of the society came up and bathed my head with cold water,

and said: “What made you carry on so toward the last?”

I said: “I was trying to make that confounded old fool laugh, in the

second row.”

And he said: “Well, you were wasting your time, because he is deaf and

dumb, and as blind as a badger!”

Now, was that any way for that old man's nephew to impose on a stranger

and orphan like me? I ask you as a man and brother, if that was any way

for him to do?

THE OFFICE BORE--[Written about 1869]

He arrives just as regularly as the clock strikes nine in the morning.

And so he even beats the editor sometimes, and the porter must leave his

work and climb two or three pairs of stairs to unlock the “Sanctum” door

and let him in. He lights one of the office pipes--not reflecting, perhaps,

that the editor may be one of those “stuck-up” people who would

as soon have a stranger defile his tooth-brush as his pipe-stem. Then he

begins to loll--for a person who can consent to loaf his useless life

away in ignominious indolence has not the energy to sit up straight.

He stretches full length on the sofa awhile; then draws up to half

length; then gets into a chair, hangs his head back and his arms abroad,

and stretches his legs till the rims of his boot-heels rest upon the

floor; by and by sits up and leans forward, with one leg or both over the

arm of the chair. But it is still observable that with all his changes

of position, he never assumes the upright or a fraudful affectation of

dignity. From time to time he yawns, and stretches, and scratches

himself with a tranquil, mangy enjoyment, and now and then he grunts a

kind of stuffy, overfed grunt, which is full of animal contentment. At

rare and long intervals, however, he sighs a sigh that is the eloquent

expression of a secret confession, to wit “I am useless and a nuisance,

a cumberer of the earth.” The bore and his comrades--for there are

usually from two to four on hand, day and night--mix into the

conversation when men come in to see the editors for a moment on

business; they hold noisy talks among themselves about politics in

particular, and all other subjects in general--even warming up, after a

fashion, sometimes, and seeming to take almost a real interest in what

they are discussing. They ruthlessly call an editor from his work with

such a remark as: “Did you see this, Smith, in the Gazette?” and proceed

to read the paragraph while the sufferer reins in his impatient pen and

listens; they often loll and sprawl round the office hour after hour,

swapping anecdotes and relating personal experiences to each other

--hairbreadth escapes, social encounters with distinguished men, election

reminiscences, sketches of odd characters, etc. And through all those

hours they never seem to comprehend that they are robbing the editors of

their time, and the public of journalistic excellence in next day's

paper. At other times they drowse, or dreamily pore over exchanges, or

droop limp and pensive over the chair-arms for an hour. Even this solemn

silence is small respite to the editor, for the next uncomfortable thing

to having people look over his shoulders, perhaps, is to have them sit by

in silence and listen to the scratching of his pen. If a body desires to

talk private business with one of the editors, he must call him outside,

for no hint milder than blasting-powder or nitroglycerin would be likely

to move the bores out of listening-distance. To have to sit and endure

the presence of a bore day after day; to feel your cheerful spirits begin

to sink as his footstep sounds on the stair, and utterly vanish away as

his tiresome form enters the door; to suffer through his anecdotes and

die slowly to his reminiscences; to feel always the fetters of his

clogging presence; to long hopelessly for one single day's privacy; to

note with a shudder, by and by, that to contemplate his funeral in fancy

has ceased to soothe, to imagine him undergoing in strict and fearful

detail the tortures of the ancient Inquisition has lost its power to

satisfy the heart, and that even to wish him millions and millions and

millions of miles in Tophet is able to bring only a fitful gleam of joy;

to have to endure all this, day after day, and week after week, and month

after month, is an affliction that transcends any other that men suffer.

Physical pain is pastime to it, and hanging a pleasure excursion.

JOHNNY GREER

“The church was densely crowded that lovely summer Sabbath,” said the

Sunday-school superintendent, “and all, as their eyes rested upon the small

coffin, seemed impressed by the poor black boy's fate. Above the

stillness the pastor's voice rose, and chained the interest of every ear

as he told, with many an envied compliment, how that the brave, noble,

daring little Johnny Greer, when he saw the drowned body sweeping down

toward the deep part of the river whence the agonized parents never could

have recovered it in this world, gallantly sprang into the stream, and,

at the risk of his life, towed the corpse to shore, and held it fast till

help came and secured it. Johnny Greer was sitting just in front of me.

A ragged street-boy, with eager eye, turned upon him instantly, and said

in a hoarse whisper,

“'No; but did you, though?'

“'Yes.'

“'Towed the carkiss ashore and saved it yo'self?'

“'Yes.'

“'Cracky! What did they give you?'

“'Nothing.'

“'W-h-a-t [with intense disgust]! D'you know what I'd 'a' done? I'd 'a'

anchored him out in the stream, and said, Five dollars, gents, or you

carn't have yo' nigger.'”

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT--[Written about 1867.]

In as few words as possible I wish to lay before the nation what share,

howsoever small, I have had in this matter--this matter which has so

exercised the public mind, engendered so much ill-feeling, and so filled

the newspapers of both continents with distorted statements and

extravagant comments.

The origin of this distressful thing was this--and I assert here that

every fact in the following résumé can be amply proved by the official

records of the General Government.

John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey,

deceased, contracted with the General Government, on or about the 10th

day of October, 1861, to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of

thirty barrels of beef.

Very well.

He started after Sherman with the beef, but when he got to Washington

Sherman had gone to Manassas; so he took the beef and followed him there,

but arrived too late; he followed him to Nashville, and from Nashville to

Chattanooga, and from Chattanooga to Atlanta--but he never could overtake

him. At Atlanta he took a fresh start and followed him clear through his

march to the sea. He arrived too late again by a few days; but hearing

that Sherman was going out in the Quaker City excursion to the Holy Land,

he took shipping for Beirut, calculating to head off the other vessel.

When he arrived in Jerusalem with his beef, he learned that Sherman had

not sailed in the Quaker City, but had gone to the Plains to fight the

Indians. He returned to America and started for the Rocky Mountains.

After sixty-eight days of arduous travel on the Plains, and when he had

got within four miles of Sherman's headquarters, he was tomahawked and

scalped, and the Indians got the beef. They got all of it but one

barrel. Sherman's army captured that, and so, even in death, the bold

navigator partly fulfilled his contract. In his will, which he had kept

like a journal, he bequeathed the contract to his son Bartholomew 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 10th day of October, 1861, John Wilson

Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased, contracted

with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the sum total

of thirty barrels of beef--”

He stopped me there, and dismissed me from his presence--kindly, but

firmly. The next day I called on the Secretary of State.

He said, “Well, sir?”

I said, “Your Royal Highness: on or about the 10th day of October, 1861,

John Wilson Mackenzie of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased,

contracted with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the

sum total of thirty barrels of beef--”

“That will do, sir--that will do; this office has nothing to do with

contracts for beef.”

I was bowed out. I thought the matter all over and finally, the

following day, I visited the Secretary of the Navy, who said, “Speak

quickly, sir; do not keep me waiting.”

I said, “Your Royal Highness, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861,

John Wilson Mackenzie of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased,

contracted with the General Government to General Sherman the sum total

of thirty barrels of beef--”

Well, it was as far as I could get. He had nothing to do with beef

contracts for General Sherman, either. I began to think it was a curious

kind of government. It looked somewhat as if they wanted to get out of

paying for that beef. The following day I went to the Secretary of the

Interior.

I said, “Your Imperial Highness, on or about the 10th day of October--”

“That is sufficient, sir. I have heard of you before. Go, take your

infamous beef contract out of this establishment. The Interior

Department has nothing whatever to do with subsistence for the army.”

I went away. But I was exasperated now. I said I would haunt them;

I would infest every department of this iniquitous government till that

contract business was settled. I would collect that bill, or fall, as

fell my predecessors, trying. I assailed the Postmaster-General;

I besieged the Agricultural Department; I waylaid the Speaker of the

House of Representatives. They had nothing to do with army contracts for

beef. I moved upon the Commissioner of the Patent Office.

I said, “Your August Excellency, on or about--”

“Perdition! have you got HERE with your incendiary beef contract, at

last? We have nothing to do with beef contracts for the army, my dear

sir.”

“Oh, that is all very well--but somebody has got to pay for that beef.

It has got to be paid now, too, or I'll confiscate this old Patent Office

and everything in it.”

“But, my dear sir--”

“It don't make any difference, sir. The Patent Office is liable for that

beef, I reckon; and, liable or not liable, the Patent Office has got to

pay for it.”

Never mind the details. It ended in a fight. The Patent Office won.

But I found out something to my advantage. I was told that the Treasury

Department was the proper place for me to go to. I went there. I waited

two hours and a half, and then I was admitted to the First Lord of the

Treasury.

I said, “Most noble, grave, and reverend Signor, on or about the 10th day

of October, 1861, John Wilson Macken--”

“That is sufficient, sir. I have heard of you. Go to the First Auditor

of the Treasury.”

I did so. He sent me to the Second Auditor. The Second Auditor sent me

to the Third, and the Third sent me to the First Comptroller of the

Corn-Beef Division. This began to look like business. He examined his

books and all his loose papers, but found no minute of the beef contract.

I went to the Second Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division. He examined

his books and his loose papers, but with no success. I was encouraged.

During that week I got as far as the Sixth Comptroller in that division;

the next week I got through the Claims Department; the third week I began

and completed the Mislaid Contracts Department, and got a foothold in the

Dead Reckoning Department. I finished that in three days. There was

only one place left for it now. I laid siege to the Commissioner of Odds

and Ends. To his clerk, rather--he was not there himself. There were

sixteen beautiful young ladies in the room, writing in books, and there

were seven well-favored young clerks showing them how. The young women

smiled up over their shoulders, and the clerks smiled back at them, and

all went merry as a marriage bell. Two or three clerks that were reading

the newspapers looked at me rather hard, but went on reading, and nobody

said anything. However, I had been used to this kind of alacrity from

Fourth Assistant Junior Clerks all through my eventful career, from the

very day I entered the first office of the Corn-Beef Bureau clear till I

passed out of the last one in the Dead Reckoning Division. I had got so

accomplished by this time that I could stand on one foot from the moment

I entered an office till a clerk spoke to me, without changing more than

two, or maybe three, times.

So I stood there till I had changed four different times. Then I said to

one of the clerks who was reading:

“Illustrious Vagrant, where is the Grand Turk?”

“What do you mean, sir? whom do you mean? If you mean the Chief of the

Bureau, he is out.”

“Will he visit the harem to-day?”

The young man glared upon me awhile, and then went on reading his paper.

But I knew the ways of those clerks. I knew I was safe if he got through

before another New York mail arrived. He only had two more papers left.

After a while he finished them, and then he yawned and asked me what I

wanted.

“Renowned and honored Imbecile: on or about--”

“You are the beef-contract man. Give me your papers.”

He took them, and for a long time he ransacked his odds and ends.

Finally he found the Northwest Passage, as I regarded it--he found the

long lost record of that beef contract--he found the rock upon which so

many of my ancestors had split before they ever got to it. I was deeply

moved. And yet I rejoiced--for I had survived. I said with emotion,

“Give it me. The government will settle now.” He waved me back, and

said there was something yet to be done first.

“Where is this John Wilson Mackenzie?” said he.

“Dead.”

“When did he die?”

“He didn't die at all--he was killed.”

“How?”

“Tomahawked.”

“Who tomahawked him?”

“Why, an Indian, of course. You didn't suppose it was the superintendent

of a Sunday-school, did you?”

“No. An Indian, was it?”

“The same.”

“Name of the Indian?”

“His name? I don't know his name.”

“Must have his name. Who saw the tomahawking done?”

“I don't know.”

“You were not present yourself, then?”

“Which you can see by my hair. I was absent.

“Then how do you know that Mackenzie is dead?”

“Because he certainly died at that time, and I have every reason to believe

that he has been dead ever since. I know he has, in fact.”

“We must have proofs. Have you got the Indian?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, you must get him. Have you got the tomahawk?”

“I never thought of such a thing.”

“You must get the tomahawk. You must produce the Indian and the

tomahawk. If Mackenzie's death can be proven by these, you can then go

before the commission appointed to audit claims with some show of getting

your bill under such headway that your children may possibly live to

receive the money and enjoy it. But that man's death must be proven.

However, I may as well tell you that the government will never pay that

transportation and those traveling expenses of the lamented Mackenzie.

It may possibly pay for the barrel of beef that Sherman's soldiers

captured, if you can get a relief bill through Congress making an

appropriation for that purpose; but it will not pay for the twenty-nine

barrels the Indians ate.”

“Then there is only a hundred dollars due me, and that isn't certain!

After all Mackenzie's travels in Europe, Asia, and America with that

beef; after all his trials and tribulations and transportation; after the

slaughter of all those innocents that tried to collect that bill! Young

man, why didn't the First Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division tell me

this?”

“He didn't know anything about the genuineness of your claim.”

“Why didn't the Second tell me? why didn't the Third? why didn't all

those divisions and departments tell me?”

“None of them knew. We do things by routine here. You have followed the

routine and found out what you wanted to know. It is the best way.

It is the only way. It is very regular, and very slow, but it is very

certain.”

“Yes, certain death. It has been, to the most of our tribe. I begin to

feel that I, too, am called. Young man, you love the bright creature yonder with

the gentle blue eyes and the steel pens behind her ears--I see it in your soft

glances; you wish to marry her--but you are poor. Here, hold out your hand--

here is the beef contract; go, take her and be happy! Heaven bless you, my

children!”

This is all I know about the great beef contract that has created so much

talk in the community. The clerk to whom I bequeathed it died. I know

nothing further about the contract, or any one connected with it. I only

know that if a man lives long enough he can trace a thing through the

Circumlocution Office of Washington and find out, after much labor and

trouble and delay, that which he could have found out on the first day if

the business of the Circumlocution Office were as ingeniously

systematized as it would be if it were a great private mercantile

institution.

THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER

--[Some years ago, about 1867, when this was first published, few people

believed it, but considered it a mere extravaganza. In these latter days

it seems hard to realize that there was ever a time when the robbing of

our government was a novelty. The very man who showed me where to find

the documents for this case was at that very time spending hundreds of

thousands of dollars in Washington for a mail steamship concern, in the

effort to procure a subsidy for the company--a fact which was a long time

in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent

Congressional investigation.]

This is history. It is not a wild extravaganza, like “John Wilson

Mackenzie's Great Beef Contract,” but is a plain statement of facts and

circumstances with which the Congress of the United States has interested

itself from time to time during the long period of half a century.

I will not call this matter of George Fisher's a great deathless and

unrelenting swindle upon the government and people of the United States

--for it has never been so decided, and I hold that it is a grave and

solemn wrong for a writer to cast slurs or call names when such is the

case--but will simply present the evidence and let the reader deduce his

own verdict. Then we shall do nobody injustice, and our consciences

shall be clear.

On or about the 1st day of September, 1813, the Creek war being then in

progress in Florida, the crops, herds, and houses of Mr. George Fisher,

a citizen, were destroyed, either by the Indians or by the United States

troops in pursuit of them. By the terms of the law, if the Indians

destroyed the property, there was no relief for Fisher; but if the troops

destroyed it, the Government of the United States was debtor to Fisher

for the amount involved.

George Fisher must have considered that the Indians destroyed the

property, because, although he lived several years afterward, he does not

appear to have ever made any claim upon the government.

In the course of time Fisher died, and his widow married again.

And by and by, nearly twenty years after that dimly remembered raid upon

Fisher's corn-fields, the widow Fisher's new husband petitioned Congress

for pay for the property, and backed up the petition with many

depositions and affidavits which purported to prove that the troops,

and not the Indians, destroyed the property; that the troops, for some

inscrutable reason, deliberately burned down “houses” (or cabins) valued

at $600, the same belonging to a peaceable private citizen, and alsodestroyed

various other property belonging to the same citizen. But

Congress declined to believe that the troops were such idiots (after

overtaking and scattering a band of Indians proved to have been found

destroying Fisher's property) as to calmly continue the work of

destruction themselves; and make a complete job of what the Indians had

only commenced. So Congress denied the petition of the heirs of George

Fisher in 1832, and did not pay them a cent.

We hear no more from them officially until 1848, sixteen years after

their first attempt on the Treasury, and a full generation after the

death of the man whose fields were destroyed. The new generation of

Fisher heirs then came forward and put in a bill for damages. The Second

Auditor awarded them $8,873, being half the damage sustained by Fisher.

The Auditor said the testimony showed that at least half the destruction

was done by the Indians “before the troops started in pursuit,” and of

course the government was not responsible for that half.

2. That was in April, 1848. In December, 1848, the heirs of George

Fisher, deceased, came forward and pleaded for a “revision” of their bill

of damages. The revision was made, but nothing new could be found in

their favor except an error of $100 in the former calculation. However,

in order to keep up the spirits of the Fisher family, the Auditor

concluded to go back and allow interest from the date of the first

petition (1832) to the date when the bill of damages was awarded. This

sent the Fishers home happy with sixteen years' interest on $8,873--the

same amounting to $8,997.94. Total, $17,870.94.

3. For an entire year the suffering Fisher family remained quiet--even

satisfied, after a fashion. Then they swooped down upon the government

with their wrongs once more. That old patriot, Attorney-General Toucey,

burrowed through the musty papers of the Fishers and discovered one more

chance for the desolate orphans--interest on that original award of

$8,873 from date of destruction of the property (1813) up to 1832!

Result, $10,004.89 for the indigent Fishers. So now we have: First,

$8,873 damages; second, interest on it from 1832 to 1848, $8,997.94;

third, interest on it dated back to 1813, $10,004.89. Total, $27,875.83!

What better investment for a great-grandchild than to get the Indians to

burn a corn-field for him sixty or seventy years before his birth, and

plausibly lay it on lunatic United States troops?

4. Strange as it may seem, the Fishers let Congress alone for five

years--or, what is perhaps more likely, failed to make themselves heard

by Congress for that length of time. But at last, in 1854, they got a

hearing. They persuaded Congress to pass an act requiring the Auditor to

re-examine their case. But this time they stumbled upon the misfortune

of an honest Secretary of the Treasury (Mr. James Guthrie), and he

spoiled everything. He said in very plain language that the Fishers were

not only not entitled to another cent, but that those children of many

sorrows and acquainted with grief had been paid too much already.

5. Therefore another interval of rest and silence ensued--an interval

which lasted four years--viz till 1858. The “right man in the right

place” was then Secretary of War--John B. Floyd, of peculiar renown!

Here was a master intellect; here was the very man to succor the

suffering heirs of dead and forgotten Fisher. They came up from Florida

with a rush--a great tidal wave of Fishers freighted with the same old

musty documents about the same immortal corn-fields of their ancestor.

They straight-way got an act passed transferring the Fisher matter from

the dull Auditor to the ingenious Floyd. What did Floyd do? He said,

“IT WAS PROVED that the Indians destroyed everything they could before

the troops entered in pursuit.” He considered, therefore, that what they

destroyed must have consisted of “the houses with all their contents, and

the liquor” (the most trifling part of the destruction, and set down at

only $3,200 all told), and that the government troops then drove them off

and calmly proceeded to destroy--

Two hundred and twenty acres of corn in the field, thirty-five acres of

wheat, and nine hundred and eighty-six head of live stock! [What a

singularly intelligent army we had in those days, according to Mr. Floyd

--though not according to the Congress of 1832.]

So Mr. Floyd decided that the Government was not responsible for that

$3,200 worth of rubbish which the Indians destroyed, but was responsible

for the property destroyed by the troops--which property consisted of (I

quote from the printed United States Senate document):

Dollars

Corn at Bassett's Creek, ............... 3,000

Cattle, ................................ 5,000

Stock hogs, ............................ 1,050

Drove hogs, ............................ 1,204

Wheat, ................................. 350

Hides, ................................. 4,000

Corn on the Alabama River, ............. 3,500

Total, .............18,104

That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the “full value of the property

destroyed by the troops.”

He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, TOGETHER WITH INTEREST FROM

1813. From this new sum total the amounts already paid to the Fishers

were deducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction under forty

thousand dollars) was handed to them, and again they retired to Florida in

a condition of temporary tranquillity. Their ancestor's farm had now

yielded them altogether nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash.

6. Does the reader suppose that that was the end of it? Does he suppose

those diffident Fishers were satisfied? Let the evidence show. The

Fishers were quiet just two years. Then they came swarming up out of the

fertile swamps of Florida with their same old documents, and besieged

Congress once more. Congress capitulated on the 1st of June, 1860, and

instructed Mr. Floyd to overhaul those papers again, and pay that bill.

A Treasury clerk was ordered to go through those papers and report to Mr.

Floyd what amount was still due the emaciated Fishers. This clerk (I can

produce him whenever he is wanted) discovered what was apparently a

glaring and recent forgery in the papers; whereby a witness's testimony as

to the price of corn in Florida in 1813 was made to name double the

amount which that witness had originally specified as the price! The

clerk not only called his superior's attention to this thing, but in

making up his brief of the case called particular attention to it in

writing. That part of the brief never got before Congress, nor has

Congress ever yet had a hint of forgery existing among the Fisher papers.

Nevertheless, on the basis of the double prices (and totally ignoring the

clerk's assertion that the figures were manifestly and unquestionably a

recent forgery), Mr. Floyd remarks in his new report that “the testimony,

particularly in regard to the corn crops, DEMANDS A MUCH HIGHER ALLOWANCE

than any heretofore made by the Auditor or myself.” So he estimates the

crop at sixty bushels to the acre (double what Florida acres produce),

and then virtuously allows pay for only half the crop, but allows two

dollars and a half a bushel for that half, when there are rusty old books

and documents in the Congressional library to show just what the Fisher

testimony showed before the forgery--viz., that in the fall of 1813 corn

was only worth from $1.25 to $1.50 a bushel. Having accomplished this,

what does Mr. Floyd do next? Mr. Floyd (“with an earnest desire to

execute truly the legislative will,” as he piously remarks) goes to work

and makes out an entirely new bill of Fisher damages, and in this new

bill he placidly ignores the Indians altogether-- puts no particle of the

destruction of the Fisher property upon them, but, even repenting him of

charging them with burning the cabins and drinking the whisky and

breaking the crockery, lays the entire damage at the door of the imbecile

United States troops down to the very last item! And not only that, but

uses the forgery to double the loss of corn at “Bassett's Creek,” and

uses it again to absolutely treble the loss of corn on the “Alabama

River.” This new and ably conceived and executed bill of Mr. Floyd's

figures up as follows (I copy again from the printed United States Senate

document):

The United States in account with the legal representatives

of George Fisher, deceased.

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 a long

and lofty barrier of some kind, they did not know what. The Tumble-Bug

said he believed it was simply land tilted up on its edge, because he

knew he could see trees on it. But Professor Snail and the others said:

“You are hired to dig, sir--that is all. We need your muscle, not your

brains. When we want your opinion on scientific matters, we will hasten

to let you know. Your coolness is intolerable, too--loafing about here

meddling with august matters of learning, when the other laborers are

pitching camp. Go along and help handle the baggage.”

The Tumble-Bug turned on his heel uncrushed, unabashed, observing to

himself, “If it isn't land tilted up, let me die the death of the

unrighteous.”

Professor Bull Frog (nephew of the late explorer) said he believed the

ridge was the wall that inclosed the earth. He continued:

“Our fathers have left us much learning, but they had not traveled far,

and so we may count this a noble new discovery. We are safe for renown

now, even though our labors began and ended with this single achievement.

I wonder what this wall is built of? Can it be fungus? Fungus is an

honorable good thing to build a wall of.”

Professor Snail adjusted his field-glass and examined the rampart

critically. Finally he said:

“'The fact that it is not diaphanous convinces me that it is a dense

vapor formed by the calorification of ascending moisture dephlogisticated

by refraction. A few endiometrical experiments would confirm this, but

it is not necessary. The thing is obvious.”

So he shut up his glass and went into his shell to make a note of the

discovery of the world's end, and the nature of it.

“Profound mind!” said Professor Angle-Worm to Professor Field-Mouse;

“profound mind! nothing can long remain a mystery to that august brain.”

Night drew on apace, the sentinel crickets were posted, the Glow-Worm and

Fire-Fly lamps were lighted, and the camp sank to silence and sleep.

After breakfast in the morning, the expedition moved on. About noon a

great avenue was reached, which had in it two endless parallel bars of

some kind of hard black substance, raised the height of the tallest Bull

Frog above the general level. The scientists climbed up on these and

examined and tested them in various ways. They walked along them for a

great distance, but found no end and no break in them. They could arrive

at no decision. There was nothing in the records of science that

mentioned anything of this kind. But at last the bald and venerable

geographer, Professor Mud Turtle, a person who, born poor, and of a

drudging low family, had, by his own native force raised himself to the

headship of the geographers of his generation, said:

“'My friends, we have indeed made a discovery here. We have found in a

palpable, compact, and imperishable state what the wisest of our fathers

always regarded as a mere thing of the imagination. Humble yourselves,

my friends, for we stand in a majestic presence. These are parallels of

latitude!”

Every heart and every head was bowed, so awful, so sublime was the

magnitude of the discovery. Many shed tears.

The camp was pitched and the rest of the day given up to writing

voluminous accounts of the marvel, and correcting astronomical tables to

fit it. Toward midnight a demoniacal shriek was heard, then a clattering

and rumbling noise, and the next instant a vast terrific eye shot by,

with a long tail attached, and disappeared in the gloom, still uttering

triumphant shrieks.

The poor camp laborers were stricken to the heart with fright, and

stampeded for the high grass in a body. But not the scientists. They

had no superstitions. They calmly proceeded to exchange theories.

The ancient geographer's opinion was asked. He went into his shell and

deliberated long and profoundly. When he came out at last, they all knew

by his worshiping countenance that he brought light. Said he:

“Give thanks for this stupendous thing which we have been permitted to

witness. It is the Vernal Equinox!”

There were shoutings and great rejoicings.

“But,” said the Angle-Worm, uncoiling after reflection, “this is dead

summer-time.”

“Very well,” said the Turtle, “we are far from our region; the season

differs with the difference of time between the two points.”

“Ah, true. True enough. But it is night. How should the sun pass in

the night?”

“In these distant regions he doubtless passes always in the night at this

hour.”

“Yes, doubtless that is true. But it being night, how is it that we

could see him?”

“It is a great mystery. I grant that. But I am persuaded that the

humidity of the atmosphere in these remote regions is such that particles

of daylight adhere to the disk and it was by aid of these that we were

enabled to see the sun in the dark.”

This was deemed satisfactory, and due entry was made of the decision.

But about this moment those dreadful shriekings were heard again; again

the rumbling and thundering came speeding up out of the night; and once

more a flaming great eye flashed by and lost itself in gloom and

distance.

The camp laborers gave themselves up for lost. The savants were sorely

perplexed. Here was a marvel hard to account for. They thought and they

talked, they talked and they thought. Finally the learned and aged Lord

Grand-Daddy-Longlegs, who had been sitting in deep study, with his

slender limbs crossed and his stemmy arms folded, said:

“Deliver your opinions, brethren, and then I will tell my thought--for I

think I have solved this problem.”

“So be it, good your lordship,” piped the weak treble of the wrinkled and

withered Professor Woodlouse, “for we shall hear from your lordship's

lips naught but wisdom.” [Here the speaker threw in a mess of trite,

threadbare, exasperating quotations from the ancient poets and

philosophers, delivering them with unction in the sounding grandeurs of

the original tongues, they being from the Mastodon, the Dodo, and other

dead languages.] “Perhaps I ought not to presume to meddle with matters

pertaining to astronomy at all, in such a presence as this, I who have

made it the business of my life to delve only among the riches of the

extinct languages and unearth the opulence of their ancient lore; but

still, as unacquainted as I am with the noble science of astronomy, I beg

with deference and humility to suggest that inasmuch as the last of these

wonderful apparitions proceeded in exactly the opposite direction from

that pursued by the first, which you decide to be the Vernal Equinox,

and greatly resembled it in all particulars, is it not possible, nay

certain, that this last is the Autumnal Equi--”

“O-o-o!” “O-o-o! go to bed! go to bed!” with annoyed derision from

everybody. So the poor old Woodlouse retreated out of sight, consumed

with shame.

Further discussion followed, and then the united voice of the commission

begged Lord Longlegs to speak. He said:

“Fellow-scientists, it is my belief that we have witnessed a thing which

has occurred in perfection but once before in the knowledge of created

beings. It is a phenomenon of inconceivable importance and interest,

view it as one may, but its interest to us is vastly heightened by an

added knowledge of its nature which no scholar has heretofore possessed

or even suspected. This great marvel which we have just witnessed,

fellow-savants (it almost takes my breath away), is nothing less than the

transit of Venus!”

Every scholar sprang to his feet pale with astonishment. Then ensued

tears, handshakings, frenzied embraces, and the most extravagant

jubilations of every sort. But by and by, as emotion began to retire

within bounds, and reflection to return to the front, the accomplished

Chief Inspector Lizard observed:

“But how is this? Venus should traverse the sun's surface, not the

earth's.”

The arrow went home. It carried sorrow to the breast of every apostle of

learning there, for none could deny that this was a formidable criticism.

But tranquilly the venerable Duke crossed his limbs behind his ears and

said:

“My friend has touched the marrow of our mighty discovery. Yes--all that

have lived before us thought a transit of Venus consisted of a flight

across the sun's face; they thought it, they maintained it, they honestly

believed it, simple hearts, and were justified in it by the limitations

of their knowledge; but to us has been granted the inestimable boon of

proving that the transit occurs across the earth's face, for we have SEEN

it!”

The assembled wisdom sat in speechless adoration of this imperial

intellect. All doubts had instantly departed, like night before the

lightning.

The Tumble-Bug had just intruded, unnoticed. He now came reeling forward

among the scholars, familiarly slapping first one and then another on the

shoulder, saying “Nice ['ic) nice old boy!” and smiling a smile of

elaborate content. Arrived at a good position for speaking, he put his

left arm akimbo with his knuckles planted in his hip just under the edge

of his cut-away coat, bent his right leg, placing his toe on the ground

and resting his heel with easy grace against his left shin, puffed out

his aldermanic stomach, opened his lips, leaned his right elbow on

Inspector Lizard's shoulder, and--

But the shoulder was indignantly withdrawn and the hard-handed son of

toil went to earth. He floundered a bit, but came up smiling, arranged

his attitude with the same careful detail as before, only choosing

Professor Dogtick's shoulder for a support, opened his lips and--

Went to earth again. He presently scrambled up once more, still smiling,

made a loose effort to brush the dust off his coat and legs, but a smart

pass of his hand missed entirely, and the force of the unchecked impulse

slewed him suddenly around, twisted his legs together, and projected him,

limber and sprawling, into the lap of the Lord Longlegs. Two or three

scholars sprang forward, flung the low creature head over heels into a

corner, and reinstated the patrician, smoothing his ruffled dignity with

many soothing and regretful speeches. Professor Bull Frog roared out:

“No more of this, sirrah Tumble-Bug! Say your say and then get you about

your business with speed! Quick--what is your errand? Come move off a

trifle; you smell like a stable; what have you been at?”

“Please ['ic!) please your worship I chanced to light upon a find. But

no m(e-uck!) matter 'bout that. There's b['ic !) been another find

which--beg pardon, your honors, what was that th['ic!) thing that ripped

by here first?”

“It was the Vernal Equinox.”

“Inf['ic!)fernal equinox. 'At's all right. D['ic !) Dunno him. What's

other one?”

“The transit of Venus.

“G['ic !) Got me again. No matter. Las' one dropped something.”

“Ah, indeed! Good luck! Good news! Quick what is it?”

“M['ic!) Mosey out 'n' see. It'll pay.”

No more votes were taken for four-and-twenty hours. Then the following

entry was made:

“The commission went in a body to view the find. It was found to consist

of a hard, smooth, huge object with a rounded summit surmounted by a

short upright projection resembling a section of a cabbage stalk divided

transversely. This projection was not solid, but was a hollow cylinder

plugged with a soft woody substance unknown to our region--that is, it

had been so plugged, but unfortunately this obstruction had been

heedlessly removed by Norway Rat, Chief of the Sappers and Miners, before

our arrival. The vast object before us, so mysteriously conveyed from

the glittering domains of space, was found to be hollow and nearly filled

with a pungent liquid of a brownish hue, like rainwater that has stood

for some time. And such a spectacle as met our view! Norway Rat was

perched upon the summit engaged in thrusting his tail into the

cylindrical projection, drawing it out dripping, permitting the

struggling multitude of laborers to suck the end of it, then straightway

reinserting it and delivering the fluid to the mob as before. Evidently

this liquor had strangely potent qualities; for all that partook of it

were immediately exalted with great and pleasurable emotions, and went

staggering about singing ribald songs, embracing, fighting, dancing,

discharging irruptions of profanity, and defying all authority. Around

us struggled a massed and uncontrolled mob--uncontrolled and likewise

uncontrollable, for the whole army, down to the very sentinels, were mad

like the rest, by reason of the drink. We were seized upon by these

reckless creatures, and within the hour we, even we, were

undistinguishable from the rest--the demoralization was complete and

universal. In time the camp wore itself out with its orgies and sank

into a stolid and pitiable stupor, in whose mysterious bonds rank was

forgotten and strange bedfellows made, our eyes, at the resurrection,

being blasted and our souls petrified with the incredible spectacle of

that intolerable stinking scavenger, the Tumble-Bug, and the illustrious

patrician my Lord Grand Daddy, Duke of Longlegs, lying soundly steeped in

sleep, and clasped lovingly in each other's arms, the like whereof hath

not been seen in all the ages that tradition compasseth, and doubtless

none shall ever in this world find faith to master the belief of it save

only we that have beheld the damnable and unholy vision. Thus

inscrutable be the ways of God, whose will be done!

“This day, by order, did the engineer-in-chief, Herr Spider, rig the

necessary tackle for the overturning of the vast reservoir, and so its

calamitous contents were discharged in a torrent upon the thirsty earth,

which drank it up, and now there is no more danger, we reserving but a

few drops for experiment and scrutiny, and to exhibit to the king and

subsequently preserve among the wonders of the museum. What this liquid

is has been determined. It is without question that fierce and most

destructive fluid called lightning. It was wrested, in its container,

from its storehouse in the clouds, by the resistless might of the flying

planet, and hurled at our feet as she sped by. An interesting discovery

here results. Which is, that lightning, kept to itself, is quiescent; it

is the assaulting contact of the thunderbolt that releases it from

captivity, ignites its awful fires, and so produces an instantaneous

combustion and explosion which spread disaster and desolation far and

wide in the earth.”

After another day devoted to rest and recovery, the expedition proceeded

upon its way. Some days later it went into camp in a pleasant part of

the plain, and the savants sallied forth to see what they might find.

Their reward was at hand. Professor Bull Frog discovered a strange tree,

and called his comrades. They inspected it with profound interest. It

was very tall and straight, and wholly devoid of bark, limbs, or foliage.

By triangulation Lord Longlegs determined its altitude; Herr Spider

measured its circumference at the base and computed the circumference at

its top by a mathematical demonstration based upon the warrant furnished

by the uniform degree of its taper upward. It was considered a very

extraordinary find; and since it was a tree of a hitherto unknown

species, Professor Woodlouse gave it a name of a learned sound, being

none other than that of Professor Bull Frog translated into the ancient

Mastodon language, for it had always been the custom with discoverers to

perpetuate their names and honor themselves by this sort of connection

with their discoveries.

Now Professor Field-Mouse having placed his sensitive ear to the tree,

detected a rich, harmonious sound issuing from it. This surprising thing

was tested and enjoyed by each scholar in turn, and great was the

gladness and astonishment of all. Professor Woodlouse was requested to

add to and extend the tree's name so as to make it suggest the musical

quality it possessed--which he did, furnishing the addition Anthem

Singer, done into the Mastodon tongue.

By this time Professor Snail was making some telescopic inspections.

He discovered a great number of these trees, extending in a single rank,

with wide intervals between, as far as his instrument would carry, both

southward and northward. He also presently discovered that all these

trees were bound together, near their tops, by fourteen great ropes, one

above another, which ropes were continuous, from tree to tree, as far as

his vision could reach. This was surprising. Chief Engineer Spider ran

aloft and soon reported that these ropes were simply a web hung there by

some colossal member of his own species, for he could see its prey

dangling here and there from the strands, in the shape of mighty shreds

and rags that had a woven look about their texture and were no doubt the

discarded skins of prodigious insects which had been caught and eaten.

And then he ran along one of the ropes to make a closer inspection, but

felt a smart sudden burn on the soles of his feet, accompanied by a

paralyzing shock, wherefore he let go and swung himself to the earth by a

thread of his own spinning, and advised all to hurry at once to camp,

lest the monster should appear and get as much interested in the savants

as they were in him and his works. So they departed with speed, making

notes about the gigantic web as they went. And that evening the

naturalist of the expedition built a beautiful model of the colossal

spider, having no need to see it in order to do this, because he had

picked up a fragment of its vertebra by the tree, and so knew exactly

what the creature looked like and what its habits and its preferences

were by this simple evidence alone. He built it with a tail, teeth,

fourteen legs, and a snout, and said it ate grass, cattle, pebbles, and

dirt with equal enthusiasm. This animal was regarded as a very precious

addition to science. It was hoped a dead one might be found to stuff.

Professor Woodlouse thought that he and his brother scholars, by lying

hid and being quiet, might maybe catch a live one. He was advised to try

it. Which was all the attention that was paid to his suggestion. The

conference ended with the naming the monster after the naturalist, since

he, after God, had created it.

“And improved it, mayhap,” muttered the Tumble-Bug, who was intruding

again, according to his idle custom and his unappeasable curiosity.

END OF PART FIRST

SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS

PART SECOND

HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD COMPLETED THEIR SCIENTIFIC LABORS

A week later the expedition camped in the midst of a collection of

wonderful curiosities. These were a sort of vast caverns of stone that

rose singly and in bunches out of the plain by the side of the river

which they had first seen when they emerged from the forest. These

caverns stood in long, straight rows on opposite sides of broad aisles

that were bordered with single ranks of trees. The summit of each cavern

sloped sharply both ways. Several horizontal rows of great square holes,

obstructed by a thin, shiny, transparent substance, pierced the frontage

of each cavern. Inside were caverns within caverns; and one might ascend

and visit these minor compartments by means of curious winding ways

consisting of continuous regular terraces raised one above another.

There were many huge, shapeless objects in each compartment which were

considered to have been living creatures at one time, though now the thin

brown skin was shrunken and loose, and rattled when disturbed. Spiders

were here in great number, and their cobwebs, stretched in all directions

and wreathing the great skinny dead together, were a pleasant spectacle,

since they inspired with life and wholesome cheer a scene which would

otherwise have brought to the mind only a sense of forsakenness and

desolation. Information was sought of these spiders, but in vain. They

were of a different nationality from those with the expedition, and their

language seemed but a musical, meaningless jargon. They were a timid,

gentle race, but ignorant, and heathenish worshipers of unknown gods.

The expedition detailed a great detachment of missionaries to teach them

the true religion, and in a week's time a precious work had been wrought

among those darkened creatures, not three families being by that time at

peace with each other or having a settled belief in any system of

religion whatever. This encouraged the expedition to establish a colony

of missionaries there permanently, that the work of grace might go on.

But let us not outrun our narrative. After close examination of the

fronts of the caverns, and much thinking and exchanging of theories, the

scientists determined the nature of these singular formations. They said

that each belonged mainly to the Old Red Sandstone period; that the

cavern fronts rose in innumerable and wonderfully regular strata high in

the air, each stratum about five frog-spans thick, and that in the

present discovery lay an overpowering refutation of all received geology;

for between every two layers of Old Red Sandstone reposed a thin layer of

decomposed limestone; so instead of there having been but one Old Red

Sandstone period there had certainly been not less than a hundred and

seventy-five! And by the same token it was plain that there had also

been a hundred and seventy-five floodings of the earth and depositings of

limestone strata! The unavoidable deduction from which pair of facts was

the overwhelming truth that the world, instead of being only two hundred

thousand years old, was older by millions upon millions of years! And

there was another curious thing: every stratum of Old Red Sandstone was

pierced and divided at mathematically regular intervals by vertical

strata of limestone. Up-shootings of igneous rock through fractures in

water formations were common; but here was the first instance where

water-formed rock had been so projected. It was a great and noble

discovery, and its value to science was considered to be inestimable.

A critical examination of some of the lower strata demonstrated the

presence of fossil ants and tumble-bugs (the latter accompanied by their

peculiar goods), and with high gratification the fact was enrolled upon

the scientific record; for this was proof that these vulgar laborers

belonged to the first and lowest orders of created beings, though at the

same time there was something repulsive in the reflection that the

perfect and exquisite creature of the modern uppermost order owed its

origin to such ignominious beings through the mysterious law of

Development of Species.

The Tumble-Bug, overhearing this discussion, said he was willing that the

parvenus of these new times should find what comfort they might in their

wise-drawn theories, since as far as he was concerned he was content to

be of the old first families and proud to point back to his place among

the old original aristocracy of the land.

“Enjoy your mushroom dignity, stinking of the varnish of yesterday's

veneering, since you like it,” said he; “suffice it for the Tumble-Bugs

that they come of a race that rolled their fragrant spheres down the

solemn aisles of antiquity, and left their imperishable works embalmed in

the Old Red Sandstone to proclaim it to the wasting centuries as they

file along the highway of Time!”

“Oh, take a walk!” said the chief of the expedition, with derision.

The summer passed, and winter approached. In and about many of the

caverns were what seemed to be inscriptions. Most of the scientists said

they were inscriptions, a few said they were not. The chief philologist,

Professor Woodlouse, maintained that they were writings, done in a

character utterly unknown to scholars, and in a language equally unknown.

He had early ordered his artists and draftsmen to make facsimiles of all

that were discovered; and had set himself about finding the key to the

hidden tongue. In this work he had followed the method which had always

been used by decipherers previously. That is to say, he placed a number

of copies of inscriptions before him and studied them both collectively

and in detail. To begin with, he placed the following copies together:

THE AMERICAN HOTEL. MEALS AT ALL HOURS.

THE SHADES. NO SMOKING.

BOATS FOR HIRE CHEAP UNION PRAYER MEETING, 4 P.M.

BILLIARDS. THE WATERSIDE JOURNAL.

THE A1 BARBER SHOP. TELEGRAPH OFFICE.

KEEP OFF THE GRASS. TRY BRANDRETH'S PILLS.

COTTAGES FOR RENT DURING THE WATERING SEASON.

FOR SALE CHEAP. FOR SALE CHEAP.

FOR SALE CHEAP. FOR SALE CHEAP.

At first it seemed to the professor that this was a sign-language, and

that each word was represented by a distinct sign; further examination

convinced him that it was a written language, and that every letter of

its alphabet was represented by a character of its own; and finally he

decided that it was a language which conveyed itself partly by letters,

and partly by signs or hieroglyphics. This conclusion was forced upon

him by the discovery of several specimens of the following nature:

He observed that certain inscriptions were met with in greater frequency

than others. Such as “FOR SALE CHEAP”; “BILLIARDS”; “S. T.--1860--X”;

“KENO”; “ALE ON DRAUGHT.” Naturally, then, these must be religious

maxims. But this idea was cast aside by and by, as the mystery of the

strange alphabet began to clear itself. In time, the professor was

enabled to translate several of the inscriptions with considerable

plausibility, though not to the perfect satisfaction of all the scholars.

Still, he made constant and encouraging progress.

Finally a cavern was discovered with these inscriptions upon it:

WATERSIDE MUSEUM.

Open at All Hours.

Admission 50 cents.

WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF

WAX-WORKS, ANCIENT FOSSILS,

ETC.

Professor Woodlouse affirmed that the word “Museum” was equivalent to the

phrase “lumgath molo,” or “Burial Place.” Upon entering, the scientists

were well astonished. But what they saw may be best conveyed in the

language of their own official report:

“Erect, in a row, were a sort of rigid great figures which struck us

instantly as belonging to the long extinct species of reptile called MAN,

described in our ancient records. This was a peculiarly gratifying

discovery, because of late times it has become fashionable to regard this

creature as a myth and a superstition, a work of the inventive

imaginations of our remote ancestors. But here, indeed, was Man,

perfectly preserved, in a fossil state. And this was his burial place,

as already ascertained by the inscription. And now it began to be

suspected that the caverns we had been inspecting had been his ancient

haunts in that old time that he roamed the earth--for upon the breast of

each of these tall fossils was an inscription in the character heretofore

noticed. One read, 'CAPTAIN KIDD THE PIRATE'; another, 'QUEEN VICTORIA';

another, 'ABE LINCOLN'; another, 'GEORGE WASHINGTON,' etc.

“With feverish interest we called for our ancient scientific records to

discover if perchance the description of Man there set down would tally

with the fossils before us. Professor Woodlouse read it aloud in its

quaint and musty phraseology, to wit:

“'In ye time of our fathers Man still walked ye earth, as by tradition we

know. It was a creature of exceeding great size, being compassed about

with a loose skin, sometimes of one color, sometimes of many, the which

it was able to cast at will; which being done, the hind legs were

discovered to be armed with short claws like to a mole's but broader, and

ye forelegs with fingers of a curious slimness and a length much more

prodigious than a frog's, armed also with broad talons for scratching in

ye earth for its food. It had a sort of feathers upon its head such as

hath a rat, but longer, and a beak suitable for seeking its food by ye

smell thereof. When it was stirred with happiness, it leaked water from

its eyes; and when it suffered or was sad, it manifested it with a

horrible hellish cackling clamor that was exceeding dreadful to hear and

made one long that it might rend itself and perish, and so end its

troubles. Two Mans being together, they uttered noises at each other

like this: “Haw-haw-haw--dam good, dam good,” together with other sounds

of more or less likeness to these, wherefore ye poets conceived that they

talked, but poets be always ready to catch at any frantic folly, God he

knows. Sometimes this creature goeth about with a long stick ye which it

putteth to its face and bloweth fire and smoke through ye same with a

sudden and most damnable bruit and noise that doth fright its prey to

death, and so seizeth it in its talons and walketh away to its habitat,

consumed with a most fierce and devilish joy.'

“Now was the description set forth by our ancestors wonderfully indorsed

and confirmed by the fossils before us, as shall be seen. The specimen

marked 'Captain Kidd' was examined in detail. Upon its head and part of

its face was a sort of fur like that upon the tail of a horse. With

great labor its loose skin was removed, whereupon its body was discovered

to be of a polished white texture, thoroughly petrified. The straw it

had eaten, so many ages gone by, was still in its body, undigested--and

even in its legs.

“Surrounding these fossils were objects that would mean nothing to the

ignorant, but to the eye of science they were a revelation. They laid

bare the secrets of dead ages. These musty Memorials told us when Man

lived, and what were his habits. For here, side by side with Man, were

the evidences that he had lived in the earliest ages of creation, the

companion of the other low orders of life that belonged to that forgotten

time. Here was the fossil nautilus that sailed the primeval seas; here

was the skeleton of the mastodon, the ichthyosaurus, the cave-bear, the

prodigious elk. Here, also, were the charred bones of some of these

extinct animals and of the young of Man's own species, split lengthwise,

showing that to his taste the marrow was a toothsome luxury. It was

plain that Man had robbed those bones of their contents, since no

toothmark of any beast was upon them--albeit the Tumble-Bug intruded the

remark that 'no beast could mark a bone with its teeth, anyway.' Here

were proofs that Man had vague, groveling notions of art; for this fact

was conveyed by certain things marked with the untranslatable words,

'FLINT HATCHETS, KNIVES, ARROW-HEADS, AND BONE ORNAMENTS OF PRIMEVAL

MAN.' Some of these seemed to be rude weapons chipped out of flint, and

in a secret place was found some more in process of construction, with

this untranslatable legend, on a thin, flimsy material, lying by:

“'Jones, if you don't want to be discharged from the Musseum, make

the next primeaveal weppons more careful--you couldn't even fool one

of these sleepy old syentific grannys from the Coledge with the last

ones. And mind you the animles you carved on some of the Bone

Ornaments is a blame sight too good for any primeaveal man that was

ever fooled.--Varnum, Manager.'

“Back of the burial place was a mass of ashes, showing that Man always

had a feast at a funeral--else why the ashes in such a place; and

showing, also, that he believed in God and the immortality of the soul

--else why these solemn ceremonies?

“To, sum up. We believe that Man had a written language. We know that

he indeed existed at one time, and is not a myth; also, that he was the

companion of the cave-bear, the mastodon, and other extinct species; that

he cooked and ate them and likewise the young of his own kind; also, that

he bore rude weapons, and knew something of art; that he imagined he had

a soul, and pleased himself with the fancy that it was immortal. But let

us not laugh; there may be creatures in existence to whom we and our

vanities and profundities may seem as ludicrous.”

END OF PART SECOND

SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS

PART THIRD

Near the margin of the great river the scientists presently found a huge,

shapely stone, with this inscription:

“In 1847, in the spring, the river overflowed its banks and covered

the whole township. The depth was from two to six feet. More than

900 head of cattle were lost, and many homes destroyed. The Mayor

ordered this memorial to be erected to perpetuate the event. God

spare us the repetition of it!”

With infinite trouble, Professor Woodlouse succeeded in making a

translation of this inscription, which was sent home, and straightway an

enormous excitement was created about it. It confirmed, in a remarkable

way, certain treasured traditions of the ancients. The translation was

slightly marred by one or two untranslatable words, but these did not

impair the general clearness of the meaning. It is here presented:

“One thousand eight hundred and forty-seven years ago, the (fires?)

descended and consumed the whole city. Only some nine hundred souls

were saved, all others destroyed. The (king?) commanded this stone

to be set up to . . . (untranslatable) . . . prevent the

repetition of it.”

This was the first successful and satisfactory translation that had been

made of the mysterious character left behind him by extinct man, and it

gave Professor Woodlouse such reputation that at once every seat of

learning in his native land conferred a degree of the most illustrious

grade upon him, and it was believed that if he had been a soldier and had

turned his splendid talents to the extermination of a remote tribe of

reptiles, the king would have ennobled him and made him rich. And this,

too, was the origin of that school of scientists called Manologists,

whose specialty is the deciphering of the ancient records of the extinct

bird termed Man. [For it is now decided that Man was a bird and not a

reptile.] But Professor Woodlouse began and remained chief of these, for

it was granted that no translations were ever so free from error as his.

Others made mistakes--he seemed incapable of it. Many a memorial of the

lost race was afterward found, but none ever attained to the renown and

veneration achieved by the “Mayoritish Stone” it being so called from the

word “Mayor” in it, which, being translated “King,” “Mayoritish Stone”

was but another way of saying “King Stone.”

Another time the expedition made a great “find.” It was a vast round

flattish mass, ten frog-spans in diameter and five or six high.

Professor Snail put on his spectacles and examined it all around, and

then climbed up and inspected the top. He said:

“The result of my perlustration and perscontation of this isoperimetrical

protuberance is a belief that it is one of those rare and wonderful

creations left by the Mound Builders. The fact that this one is

lamellibranchiate in its formation, simply adds to its interest as being

possibly of a different kind from any we read of in the records of

science, but yet in no manner marring its authenticity. Let the

megalophonous grasshopper sound a blast and summon hither the perfunctory

and circumforaneous Tumble-Bug, to the end that excavations may be made

and learning gather new treasures.”

Not a Tumble-Bug could be found on duty, so the Mound was excavated by a

working party of Ants. Nothing was discovered. This would have been a

great disappointment, had not the venerable Longlegs explained the

matter. He said:

“It is now plain to me that the mysterious and forgotten race of Mound

Builders did not always erect these edifices as mausoleums, else in this

case, as in all previous cases, their skeletons would be found here,

along with the rude implements which the creatures used in life. Is not

this manifest?”

“True! true!” from everybody.

“Then we have made a discovery of peculiar value here; a discovery which

greatly extends our knowledge of this creature in place of diminishing

it; a discovery which will add luster to the achievements of this

expedition and win for us the commendations of scholars everywhere.

For the absence of the customary relics here means nothing less than

this: The Mound Builder, instead of being the ignorant, savage reptile we

have been taught to consider him, was a creature of cultivation and high

intelligence, capable of not only appreciating worthy achievements of the

great and noble of his species, but of commemorating them!

Fellow-scholars, this stately Mound is not a sepulcher, it is a monument!”

A profound impression was produced by this.

But it was interrupted by rude and derisive laughter--and the Tumble-Bug

appeared.

“A monument!” quoth he. “A monument setup by a Mound Builder! Aye, so

it is! So it is, indeed, to the shrewd keen eye of science; but to an

ignorant poor devil who has never seen a college, it is not a Monument,

strictly speaking, but is yet a most rich and noble property; and with

your worship's good permission I will proceed to manufacture it into

spheres of exceeding grace and--”

The Tumble-Bug was driven away with stripes, and the draftsmen of the

expedition were set to making views of the Monument from different

standpoints, while Professor Woodlouse, in a frenzy of scientific zeal,

traveled all over it and all around it hoping to find an inscription.

But if there had ever been one, it had decayed or been removed by some

vandal as a relic.

The views having been completed, it was now considered safe to load the

precious Monument itself upon the backs of four of the largest Tortoises

and send it home to the king's museum, which was done; and when it

arrived it was received with enormous érclat and escorted to its future

abiding-place by thousands of enthusiastic citizens, King Bullfrog XVI.

himself attending and condescending to sit enthroned upon it throughout

the progress.

The growing rigor of the weather was now admonishing the scientists to

close their labors for the present, so they made preparations to journey

homeward. But even their last day among the Caverns bore fruit; for one

of the scholars found in an out-of-the-way corner of the Museum or

“Burial Place” a most strange and extraordinary thing. It was nothing

less than a double Man-Bird lashed together breast to breast by a natural

ligament, and labeled with the untranslatable words, “Siamese Twins.”

The official report concerning this thing closed thus:

“Wherefore it appears that there were in old times two distinct species

of this majestic fowl, the one being single and the other double. Nature

has a reason for all things. It is plain to the eye of science that the

Double-Man originally inhabited a region where dangers abounded; hence he

was paired together to the end that while one part slept the other might

watch; and likewise that, danger being discovered, there might always be

a double instead of a single power to oppose it. All honor to the

mystery-dispelling eye of godlike Science!”

And near the Double Man-Bird was found what was plainly an ancient record

of his, marked upon numberless sheets of a thin white substance and bound

together. Almost the first glance that Professor Woodlouse threw into it

revealed this following sentence, which he instantly translated and laid

before the scientists, in a tremble, and it uplifted every soul there

with exultation and astonishment:

“In truth it is believed by many that the lower animals reason and talk

together.”

When the great official report of the expedition appeared, the above

sentence bore this comment:

“Then there are lower animals than Man! This remarkable passage can mean

nothing else. Man himself is extinct, but they may still exist. What

can they be? Where do they inhabit? One's enthusiasm bursts all bounds

in the contemplation of the brilliant field of discovery and

investigation here thrown open to science. We close our labors with the

humble prayer that your Majesty will immediately appoint a commission and

command it to rest not nor spare expense until the search for this

hitherto unsuspected race of the creatures of God shall be crowned with

success.”

The expedition then journeyed homeward after its long absence and its

faithful endeavors, and was received with a mighty ovation by the whole

grateful country. There were vulgar, ignorant carpers, of course, as

there always are and always will be; and naturally one of these was the

obscene Tumble-Bug. He said that all he had learned by his travels was

that science only needed a spoonful of supposition to build a mountain of

demonstrated fact out of; and that for the future he meant to be content

with the knowledge that nature had made free to all creatures and not go

prying into the august secrets of the Deity.

MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP--[Written about 1867.]

I am not a private secretary to a senator any more now. I held the

berth two months in security and in great cheerfulness of spirit, but my

bread began to return from over the waters then--that is to say, my works

came back and revealed themselves. I judged it best to resign. The way

of it was this. My employer sent for me one morning tolerably early,

and, as soon as I had finished inserting some conundrums clandestinely

into his last great speech upon finance, I entered the presence. There

was something portentous in his appearance. His cravat was untied, his

hair was in a state of disorder, and his countenance bore about it the

signs of a suppressed storm. He held a package of letters in his tense

grasp, and I knew that the dreaded Pacific mail was in. He said:

“I thought you were worthy of confidence.”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “I gave you a letter from certain of my constituents in the

State of Nevada, asking the establishment of a post-office at Baldwin's

Ranch, and told you to answer it, as ingeniously as you could, with

arguments which should persuade them that there was no real necessity for

an office at that place.”

I felt easier. “Oh, if that is all, sir, I did do that.”

“Yes, you did. I will read your answer for your own humiliation:

'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24

'Messrs. Smith, Jones, and others.

'GENTLEMEN: What the mischief do you suppose you want with a

post-office at Baldwin's Ranch? It would not do you any good.

If any letters came there, you couldn't read them, you know; and,

besides, such letters as ought to pass through, with money in them,

for other localities, would not be likely to get through, you must

perceive at once; and that would make trouble for us all. No, don't

bother about a post-office in your camp. I have your best interests

at heart, and feel that it would only be an ornamental folly. What

you want is a nice jail, you know--a nice, substantial jail and a

free school. These will be a lasting benefit to you. These will

make you really contented and happy. I will move in the matter at

once.

'Very truly, etc.,

Mark Twain,

'For James W. N------, U. S. Senator.'

“That is the way you answered that letter. Those people say they will

hang me, if I ever enter that district again; and I am perfectly

satisfied they will, too.”

“Well, sir, I did not know I was doing any harm. I only wanted to

convince them.”

“Ah. Well, you did convince them, I make no manner of doubt. Now, here

is another specimen. I gave you a petition from certain gentlemen of

Nevada, praying that I would get a bill through Congress incorporating

the Methodist Episcopal Church of the State of Nevada. I told you to

say, in reply, that the creation of such a law came more properly within

the province of the state legislature; and to endeavor to show them that,

in the present feebleness of the religious element in that new commonwealth, the

expediency of incorporating the church was questionable. What did you write?

“'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24.

“'Rev. John Halifax and others.

“'GENTLEMEN: You will have to go to the state legislature about that

speculation of yours--Congress don't know anything about religion.

But don't you hurry to go there, either; because this thing you

propose to do out in that new country isn't expedient--in fact, it

is ridiculous. Your religious people there are too feeble, in

intellect, in morality, in piety in everything, pretty much. You

had better drop this--you can't make it work. You can't issue stock

on an incorporation like that--or if you could, it would only keep

you in trouble all the time. The other denominations would abuse

it, and “bear” it, and “sell it short,” and break it down. They

would do with it just as they would with one of your silver-mines

out there--they would try to make all the world believe it was

“wildcat.” You ought not to do anything that is calculated to bring

a sacred thing into disrepute. You ought to be ashamed of

yourselves--that is what I think about it. You close your petition

with the words: “And we will ever pray.” I think you had better--you

need to do it.

“'Very truly, etc.,

“'MARK TWAIN,

“'For James W. N-----, U. S. Senator.'

“That luminous epistle finishes me with the religious element among my

constituents. But that my political murder might be made sure, some evil

instinct prompted me to hand you this memorial from the grave company of

elders composing the board of aldermen of the city of San Francisco, to

try your hand upon--a memorial praying that the city's right to the

water-lots upon the city front might be established by law of Congress.

I told you this was a dangerous matter to move in. I told you to write a

non-committal letter to the aldermen--an ambiguous letter--a letter that

should avoid, as far as possible, all real consideration and discussion

of the water-lot question. If there is any feeling left in you--any

shame--surely this letter you wrote, in obedience to that order, ought to

evoke it, when its words fall upon your ears:

'WASHINGTON, Nov. 27

'The Honorable Board of Aldermen, etc.

'GENTLEMEN: George Washington, the revered Father of his Country,

is dead. His long and brilliant career is closed, alas! forever.

He was greatly respected in this section of the country, and his

untimely decease cast a gloom over the whole community. He died on

the 14th day of December, 1799. He passed peacefully away from the

scene of his honors and his great achievements, the most lamented

hero and the best beloved that ever earth hath yielded unto Death.

At such a time as this, you speak of water-lots! what a lot was his!

'What is fame! Fame is an accident. Sir Isaac Newton discovered

an apple falling to the ground--a trivial discovery, truly, and one

which a million men had made before him--but his parents were

influential, and so they tortured that small circumstance into

something wonderful, and, lo! the simple world took up the shout

and, in almost the twinkling of an eye, that man was famous.

Treasure these thoughts.

'Poesy, sweet poesy, who shall estimate what the world owes to

thee!

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow--

And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”

“Jack and Gill went up the hill

To draw a pail of water;

Jack fell down and broke his crown,

And Gill came tumbling after.”

'For simplicity, elegance of diction, and freedom from immoral

tendencies, I regard those two poems in the light of gems. They

are suited to all grades of intelligence, to every sphere of life

--to the field, to the nursery, to the guild. Especially should

no Board of Aldermen be without them.

'Venerable fossils! write again. Nothing improves one so much as

friendly correspondence. Write again--and if there is anything in

this memorial of yours that refers to anything in particular, do

not be backward about explaining it. We shall always be happy to

hear you chirp.

'Very truly, etc.,

“'MARK TWAIN,

'For James W. N-----, U. S. Senator.'

“That is an atrocious, a ruinous epistle! Distraction!”

“Well, sir, I am really sorry if there is anything wrong about it--but

--but it appears to me to dodge the water-lot question.”

“Dodge the mischief! Oh!--but never mind. As long as destruction must

come now, let it be complete. Let it be complete--let this last of your

performances, which I am about to read, make a finality of it. I am a

ruined man. I had my misgivings when I gave you the letter from

Humboldt, asking that the post route from Indian Gulch to Shakespeare Gap

and intermediate points be changed partly to the old Mormon trail. But I

told you it was a delicate question, and warned you to deal with it

deftly--to answer it dubiously, and leave them a little in the dark.

And your fatal imbecility impelled you to make this disastrous reply.

I should think you would stop your ears, if you are not dead to all

shame:

“'WASHINGTON, Nov. 30.

“'Messrs. Perkins, Wagner, et al.

“'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 bosh, and has no point to it, and no sense in

it, and no information in it, and that there was no sort of necessity for

stopping the press to publish it.

Now all this comes of being good-hearted. If I had been as

unaccommodating and unsympathetic as some people, I would have told

Mr. Bloke that I wouldn't receive his communication at such a late hour;

but no, his snuffling distress touched my heart, and I jumped at the

chance of doing something to modify his misery. I never read his item to

see whether there was anything wrong about it, but hastily wrote the few

lines which preceded it, and sent it to the printers. And what has my

kindness done for me? It has done nothing but bring down upon me a storm

of abuse and ornamental blasphemy.

Now I will read that item myself, and see if there is any foundation for

all this fuss. And if there is, the author of it shall hear from me.

I have read it, and I am bound to admit that it seems a little mixed at a

first glance. However, I will peruse it once more.

I have read it again, and it does really seem a good deal more mixed than

ever.

I have read it over five times, but if I can get at the meaning of it I

wish I may get my just deserts. It won't bear analysis. There are

things about it which I cannot understand at all. It don't say whatever

became of William Schuyler. It just says enough about him to get one

interested in his career, and then drops him. Who is William Schuyler,

anyhow, and what part of South Park did he live in, and if he started

down-town at six o'clock, did he ever get there, and if he did, did

anything happen to him? Is he the individual that met with the

“distressing accident”? Considering the elaborate circumstantiality of

detail observable in the item, it seems to me that it ought to contain

more information than it does. On the contrary, it is obscur--and not

only obscure, but utterly incomprehensible. Was the breaking of Mr.

Schuyler's leg, fifteen years ago, the “distressing accident” that

plunged Mr. Bloke into unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up here

at dead of night and stop our press to acquaint the world with the

circumstance? Or did the “distressing accident” consist in the

destruction of Schuyler's mother-in-law's property in early times?

Or did it consist in the death of that person herself three years ago

(albeit it does not appear that she died by accident)? In a word, what

did that “distressing accident” consist in? What did that driveling ass

of a Schuyler stand in the wake of a runaway horse for, with his shouting

and gesticulating, if he wanted to stop him? And how the mischief could

he get run over by a horse that had already passed beyond him? And what

are we to take “warning” by? And how is this extraordinary chapter of

incomprehensibilities going to be a “lesson” to us? And, above all, what

has the intoxicating “bowl” got to do with it, anyhow? It is not stated

that Schuyler drank, or that his wife drank, or that his mother-in-law

drank, or that the horse drank--wherefore, then, the reference to the

intoxicating bowl? It does seem to me that if Mr. Bloke had let the

intoxicating bowl alone himself, he never would have got into so much

trouble about this exasperating imaginary accident. I have read this

absurd item over and over again, with all its insinuating plausibility,

until my head swims; but I can make neither head nor tail of it. There

certainly seems to have been an accident of some kind or other, but it is

impossible to determine what the nature of it was, or who was the

sufferer by it. I do not like to do it, but I feel compelled to request

that the next time anything happens to one of Mr. Bloke's friends, he

will append such explanatory notes to his account of it as will enable me

to find out what sort of an accident it was and whom it happened to. I

had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the

verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another such

production as the above.

A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE [written about 1868]

CHAPTER I

THE SECRET REVEALED.

It was night. Stillness reigned in the grand old feudal castle of

Klugenstein. The year 1222 was drawing to a close. Far away up in the

tallest of the castle's towers a single light glimmered. A secret

council was being held there. The stern old lord of Klugenstein sat in

a chair of state meditating. Presently he said, with a tender

accent:

“My daughter!”

A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,

answered:

“Speak, father!”

“My daughter, the time is come for the revealing of the mystery that hath

puzzled all your young life. Know, then, that it had its birth in the

matters which I shall now unfold. My brother Ulrich is the great Duke of

Brandenburgh. Our father, on his deathbed, decreed that if no son were

born to Ulrich, the succession should pass to my house, provided a son

were born to me. And further, in case no son were born to either, but

only daughters, then the succession should pass to Ulrich's daughter,

if she proved stainless; if she did not, my daughter should succeed,

if she retained a blameless name. And so I and my old wife here prayed

fervently for the good boon of a son, but the prayer was vain. You were

born to us. I was in despair. I saw the mighty prize slipping from my

grasp---the splendid dream vanishing away! And I had been so hopeful!

Five years had Ulrich lived in wedlock, and yet his wife had borne no

heir of either sex.

“'But hold,' I said, 'all is not lost.' A saving scheme had shot athwart

my brain. You were born at midnight. Only the leech, the nurse, and six

waiting-women knew your sex. I hanged them every one before an hour

sped. Next morning all the barony went mad with rejoicing over the

proclamation that a son was born to Klugenstein---an heir to mighty

Brandenburgh! And well the secret has been kept. Your mother's own

sister nursed your infancy, and from that time forward we feared nothing.

“When you were ten years old, a daughter was born to Ulrich. We grieved,

but hoped for good results from measles, or physicians, or other natural

enemies of infancy, but were always disappointed. She lived, she throve

---Heaven's malison upon her! But it is nothing. We are safe. For,

ha!ha! have we not a son? And is not our son the future duke? Our

well-beloved Conrad, is it not so?---for, woman of eight-and-twenty years

as you are, my child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!

“Now it hath come to pass that age hath laid its hand upon my brother,

and he waxes feeble. The cares of state do tax him sore, therefore he

wills that you shall come to him and be already duke in act, though not

yet in name. Your servitors are ready--you journey forth to-night.

“Now listen well. Remember every word I say. There is a law as old as

Germany, that if any woman sit for a single instant in the great ducal

chair before she hath been absolutely crowned in presence of the people,

SHE SHALL DIE! So heed my words. Pretend humility. Pronounce your

judgments from the Premier's chair, which stands at the foot of the

throne. Do this until you are crowned and safe. It is not likely that

your sex will ever be discovered, but still it is the part of wisdom to

make all things as safe as may be in this treacherous earthly life.”

“Oh, my father, is it for this my life hath been a lie? Was it that I

might cheat my unoffending cousin of her rights? Spare me, father,

spare your child!”

“What, hussy! Is this my reward for the august fortune my brain has

wrought for thee? By the bones of my father, this puling sentiment of

thine but ill accords with my humor.

“Betake thee to the duke, instantly, and beware how thou meddlest with my

purpose!”

Let this suffice, of the conversation. It is enough for us to know that

the prayers, the entreaties and the tears of the gentle-natured girl

availed nothing. Neither they nor anything could move the stout old lord of

Klugenstein. And so, at last, with a heavy heart, the daughter saw the

castle gates close behind her, and found herself riding away in the

darkness surrounded by a knightly array of armed vassals and a brave

following of servants.

The old baron sat silent for many minutes after his daughter's departure,

and then he turned to his sad wife and said:

“Dame, our matters seem speeding fairly. It is full three months since I

sent the shrewd and handsome Count Detzin on his devilish mission to my

brother's daughter Constance. If he fail, we are not wholly safe, but if

he do succeed, no power can bar our girl from being Duchess e'en though

ill-fortune should decree she never should be Duke!”

“My heart is full of bodings, yet all may still be well.”

“Tush, woman! Leave the owls to croak. To bed with ye, and dream of

Brandenburgh and grandeur!”

CHAPTER II.

FESTIVITY AND TEARS

Six days after the occurrences related in the above chapter, the

brilliant capital of the Duchy of Brandenburgh was resplendent with

military pageantry, and noisy with the rejoicings of loyal multitudes;

for Conrad, the young heir to the crown, was come. The old duke's heart

was full of happiness, for Conrad's handsome person and graceful bearing

had won his love at once. The great halls of the palace were thronged

with nobles, who welcomed Conrad bravely; and so bright and happy did all

things seem that he felt his fears and sorrows passing away and giving

place to a comforting contentment.

But in a remote apartment of the palace a scene of a different nature

was transpiring. By a window stood the duke's only child, the Lady

Constance. Her eyes were red and swollen and full of tears. She was

alone. Presently she fell to weeping anew, and said aloud:

“The villain Detzin is gone--has fled the dukedom! I could not believe

it at first, but alas! it is too true. And I loved him so. I dared to

love him though I knew the duke, my father, would never let me wed him.

I loved him--but now I hate him! With all my soul I hate him! Oh, what

is to become of me! I am lost, lost, lost! I shall go mad!”

CHAPTER III.

THE PLOT THICKENS.

Few months drifted by. All men published the praises of the young

Conrad's government and extolled the wisdom of his judgments, the

mercifulness of his sentences, and the modesty with which he bore himself

in his great office. The old duke soon gave everything into his hands,

and sat apart and listened with proud satisfaction while his heir

delivered the decrees of the crown from the seat of the premier.

It seemed plain that one so loved and praised and honored of all men

as Conrad was could not be otherwise than happy. But strangely enough,

he was not. For he saw with dismay that the Princess Constance had begun

to love him! The love of the rest of the world was happy fortune for

him, but this was freighted with danger! And he saw, moreover, that the

delighted duke had discovered his daughter's passion likewise, and was

already dreaming of a marriage. Every day somewhat of the deep sadness

that had been in the princess's face faded away; every day hope and

animation beamed brighter from her eye; and by and by even vagrant smiles

visited the face that had been so troubled.

Conrad was appalled. He bitterly cursed himself for having yielded to

the instinct that had made him seek the companionship of one of his own

sex when he was new and a stranger in the palace--when he was sorrowful

and yearned for a sympathy such as only women can give or feel. He now

began to avoid his cousin. But this only made matters worse, for,

naturally enough, the more he avoided her the more she cast herself in

his way. He marveled at this at first, and next it startled him. The

girl haunted him; she hunted him; she happened upon him at all times and

in all places, in the night as well as in the day. She seemed singularly

anxious. There was surely a mystery somewhere.

This could not go on forever. All the world was talking about it. The

duke was beginning to look perplexed. Poor Conrad was becoming a very

ghost through dread and dire distress. One day as he was emerging from a

private anteroom attached to the picture-gallery, Constance confronted

him, and seizing both his hands, in hers, exclaimed:

“Oh, why do you avoid me? What have I done--what have I said, to lose

your kind opinion of me--for surely I had it once? Conrad, do not

despise me, but pity a tortured heart? I cannot, cannot hold the words

unspoken longer, lest they kill me--I LOVE you, CONRAD! There, despise

me if you must, but they would be uttered!”

Conrad was speechless. Constance hesitated a moment, and then,

misinterpreting his silence, a wild gladness flamed in her eyes, and she

flung her arms about his neck and said:

“You relent! you relent! You can love me--you will love me! Oh, say you

will, my own, my worshipped Conrad!'”

Conrad groaned aloud. A sickly pallor overspread his countenance, and

he trembled like an aspen. Presently, in desperation, he thrust the poor

girl from him, and cried:

“You know not what you ask! It is forever and ever impossible!” And then

he fled like a criminal, and left the princess stupefied with amazement.

A minute afterward she was crying and sobbing there, and Conrad was

crying and sobbing in his chamber. Both were in despair. Both saw ruin

staring them in the face.

By and by Constance rose slowly to her feet and moved away, saying:

“To think that he was despising my love at the very moment that I thought

it was melting his cruel heart! I hate him! He spurned me--did this

man--he spurned me from him like a dog!”

CHAPTER IV

THE AWFUL REVELATION.

Time passed on. A settled sadness rested once more upon the countenance

of the good duke's daughter. She and Conrad were seen together no more

now. The duke grieved at this. But as the weeks wore away Conrad's

color came back to his cheeks and his old-time vivacity to his eye, and

he administered the government with a clear and steadily ripening wisdom.

Presently a strange whisper began to be heard about the palace. It grew

louder; it spread farther. The gossips of the city got hold of it. It

swept the dukedom. And this is what the whisper said:

“The Lady Constance hath given birth to a child!”

When the lord of Klugenstein heard it, he swung his plumed helmet thrice

around his head and shouted:

“Long live Duke Conrad!--for lo, his crown is sure from this day

forward! Detzin has done his errand well, and the good scoundrel shall

be rewarded!”

And he spread the tidings far and wide, and for eight-and-forty hours no

soul in all the barony but did dance and sing, carouse and illuminate, to

celebrate the great event, and all at proud and happy old Klugenstein's

expense.

CHAPTER V.

THE FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE.

The trial was at hand. All the great lords and barons of Brandenburgh

were assembled in the Hall of Justice in the ducal palace. No space was

left unoccupied where there was room for a spectator to stand or sit.

Conrad, clad in purple and ermine, sat in the Premier's chair, and on

either side sat the great judges of the realm. The old duke had sternly

commanded that the trial of his daughter should proceed without favor,

and then had taken to his bed broken-hearted. His days were numbered.

Poor Conrad had begged, as for his very life, that he might be spared the

misery of sitting in judgment upon his cousin's crime, but it did not

avail.

The saddest heart in all that great assemblage was in Conrad's breast.

The gladdest was in his father's, for, unknown to his daughter “Conrad,”

the old Baron Klugenstein was come, and was among the crowd of nobles,

triumphant in the swelling fortunes of his house.

After the heralds had made due proclamation and the other preliminaries

had followed, the venerable Lord Chief justice said:

“Prisoner, stand forth!”

The unhappy princess rose, and stood unveiled before the vast multitude.

The Lord Chief Justice continued:

“Most noble lady, before the great judges of this realm it hath been

charged and proven that out of holy wedlock your Grace hath given birth

unto a child, and by our ancient law the penalty is death excepting in

one sole contingency, whereof his Grace the acting Duke, our good Lord

Conrad, will advertise you in his solemn sentence now; wherefore, give

heed.”

Conrad stretched forth the reluctant sceptre, and in the selfsame moment

the womanly heart beneath his robe yearned pityingly toward the doomed

prisoner, and the tears came into his eyes. He opened his lips to speak,

but the Lord Chief Justice said quickly:

“Not there, your Grace, not there! It is not lawful to pronounce

judgment upon any of the ducal line SAVE FROM THE DUCAL THRONE!”

A shudder went to the heart of poor Conrad, and a tremor shook the iron

frame of his old father likewise. CONRAD HAD NOT BEEN CROWNED--dared he

profane the throne? He hesitated and turned pale with fear. But it must

be done. Wondering eyes were already upon him. They would be suspicious

eyes if he hesitated longer. He ascended the throne. Presently he

stretched forth the sceptre again, and said:

“Prisoner, in the name of our sovereign lord, Ulrich, Duke of

Brandenburgh, I proceed to the solemn duty that hath devolved upon me.

Give heed to my words. By the ancient law of the land, except you

produce the partner of your guilt and deliver him up to the executioner

you must surely die. Embrace this opportunity--save yourself while yet

you may. Name the father of your child!”

A solemn hush fell upon the great court--a silence so profound that men

could hear their own hearts beat. Then the princess slowly turned, with

eyes gleaming with hate, and pointing her finger straight at Conrad,

said:

“Thou art the man!”

An appalling conviction of his helpless, hopeless peril struck a chill to

Conrad's heart like the chill of death itself. What power on earth could

save him! To disprove the charge he must reveal that he was a woman,

and for an uncrowned woman to sit in the ducal chair was death! At one

and the same moment he and his grim old father swooned and fell to the

ground.

The remainder of this thrilling and eventful story will NOT be found in

this or any other publication, either now or at any future time.]

The truth is, I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly

close place that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her)

out of it again, and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole

business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers---or

else stay there. I thought it was going to be easy enough to straighten

out that little difficulty, but it looks different now.

PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT

TO THE HONORABLE THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED:

Whereas, The Constitution guarantees equal rights to all, backed by the

Declaration of Independence; and

Whereas, Under our laws, the right of property in real estate is

perpetual; and

Whereas, Under our laws, the right of property in the literary result of

a citizen's intellectual labor is restricted to forty-two years; and

Whereas, Forty-two years seems an exceedingly just and righteous term,

and a sufficiently long one for the retention of property;

Therefore, Your petitioner, having the good of his country solely at

heart, humbly prays that “equal rights” and fair and equal treatment may

be meted out to all citizens, by the restriction of rights in all

property, real estate included, to the beneficent term of forty-two

years. Then shall all men bless your honorable body and be happy. And

for this will your petitioner ever pray.

MARK TWAIN.

A PARAGRAPH NOT ADDED TO THE PETITION

The charming absurdity of restricting property-rights in books to

forty-two years sticks prominently out in the fact that hardly any man's

books ever live forty-two years, or even the half of it; and so, for the

sake of getting a shabby advantage of the heirs of about one Scott or

Burns or Milton in a hundred years, the lawmakers of the “Great” Republic

are content to leave that poor little pilfering edict upon the

statute-books. It is like an emperor lying in wait to rob a 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. 1

1 At least the above is the speech which I was going to make, but our

minister, General Schenck, presided, and after the blessing, got up

and made a great long inconceivably dull harangue, and wound up by

saying that inasmuch as speech-making did not seem to exhilarate the

guests much, all further oratory would be dispensed with during the

evening, and we could just sit and talk privately to our

elbow-neighbors and have a good sociable time. It is known that in

consequence of that remark forty-four perfected speeches died in the

womb. The depression, the gloom, the solemnity that reigned over

the banquet from that time forth will be a lasting memory with many

that were there. By that one thoughtless remark General Schenck

lost forty-four of the best friends he had in England. More than

one said that night, “And this is the sort of person that is sent to

represent us in a great sister empire!”

LIONIZING MURDERERS

I had heard so much about the celebrated fortune-teller Madame-----, that

I went to see her yesterday. She has a dark complexion naturally, and

this effect is heightened by artificial aids which cost her nothing.

She wears curls--very black ones, and I had an impression that she gave

their native attractiveness a lift with rancid butter. She wears a

reddish check handkerchief, cast loosely around her neck, and it was

plain that her other one is slow getting back from the wash. I presume

she takes snuff. At any rate, something resembling it had lodged among

the hairs sprouting from her upper lip. I know she likes garlic--I knew

that as soon as she sighed. She looked at me searchingly for nearly a

minute, with her black eyes, and then said:

“It is enough. Come!”

She started down a very dark and dismal corridor--I stepping close after

her. Presently she stopped, and said that, as the way was so crooked and

dark, perhaps she had better get a light. But it seemed ungallant to

allow a woman to put herself to so much trouble for me, and so I said:

“It is not worth while, madam. If you will heave another sigh, I think I

can follow it.”

So we got along all right. Arrived at her official and mysterious den,

she asked me to tell her the date of my birth, the exact hour of that

occurrence, and the color of my grandmother's hair. I answered as

accurately as I could. Then she said:

“Young man, summon your fortitude--do not tremble. I am about to reveal

the past.”

“Information concerning the future would be, in a general way, more--”

“Silence! You have had much trouble, some joy, some good fortune, some

bad. Your great grandfather was hanged.”

“That is a l--”

“Silence! Hanged sir. But it was not his fault. He could not help it.”

“I am glad you do him justice.”

“Ah--grieve, rather, that the jury did. He was hanged. His star crosses

yours in the fourth division, fifth sphere. Consequently you will be

hanged also.”

“In view of this cheerful--”

“I must have silence. Yours was not, in the beginning, a criminal

nature, but circumstances changed it. At the age of nine you stole

sugar. At the age of fifteen you stole money. At twenty you stole

horses. At twenty-five you committed arson. At thirty, hardened in

crime, you became an editor. You are now a public lecturer. Worse

things are in store for you. You will be sent to Congress. Next, to the

penitentiary. Finally, happiness will come again--all will be well--you

will be hanged.”

I was now in tears. It seemed hard enough to go to Congress; but to be

hanged--this was too sad, too dreadful. The woman seemed surprised at my

grief. I told her the thoughts that were in my mind. Then she comforted

me.

“Why, man,” she said, “hold up your head--you have nothing to grieve

about. Listen.

--[In this paragraph the fortune-teller details the exact history of the

Pike-Brown assassination case in New Hampshire, from the succoring and

saving of the stranger Pike by the Browns, to the subsequent hanging and

coffining of that treacherous miscreant. She adds nothing, invents

nothing, exaggerates nothing (see any New England paper for November,

1869). This Pike-Brown case is selected merely as a type, to illustrate

a custom that prevails, not in New Hampshire alone, but in every state in

the Union--I mean the sentimental custom of visiting, petting,

glorifying, and snuffling over murderers like this Pike, from the day

they enter the jail under sentence of death until they swing from the

gallows. The following extract from the Temple Bar (1866) reveals the

fact that this custom is not confined to the United States.--- “On December

31, 1841, a man named John Johnes, a shoemaker, murdered his sweetheart,

Mary Hallam, the daughter of a respectable laborer, at Mansfield, in the

county of Nottingham. He was executed on March 23, 1842. He was a man

of unsteady habits, and gave way to violent fits of passion. The girl

declined his addresses, and he said if he did not have her no one else

should. After he had inflicted the first wound, which was not

immediately fatal, she begged for her life, but seeing him resolved,

asked for time to pray. He said that he would pray for both, and

completed the crime. The wounds were inflicted by a shoemaker's knife,

and her throat was cut barbarously. After this he dropped on his knees

some time, and prayed God to have mercy on two unfortunate lovers.

He made no attempt to escape, and confessed the crime. After his

imprisonment he behaved in a most decorous manner; he won upon the good

opinion of the jail chaplain, and he was visited by the Bishop of

Lincoln. It does not appear that he expressed any contrition for the

crime, but seemed to pass away with triumphant certainty that he was

going to rejoin his victim in heaven. He was visited by some pious and

benevolent ladies of Nottingham, some of whom declared he was a child of

God, if ever there was one. One of the ladies sent him a white camellia

to wear at his execution.”]

“You will live in New Hampshire. In your sharp need and distress the

Brown family will succor you--such of them as Pike the assassin left

alive. They will be benefactors to you. When you shall have grown fat

upon their bounty, and are grateful and happy, you will desire to make

some modest return for these things, and so you will go to the house some

night and brain the whole family with an ax. You will rob the dead

bodies of your benefactors, and disburse your gains in riotous living

among the rowdies and courtesans of Boston. Then you will be arrested,

tried, condemned to be hanged, thrown into prison. Now is your happy

day. You will be converted--you will be converted just as soon as

every effort to compass pardon, commutation, or reprieve has failed--and

then!--Why, then, every morning and every afternoon, the best and purest

young ladies of the village will assemble in your cell and sing hymns.

This will show that assassination is respectable. Then you will write a

touching letter, in which you will forgive all those recent Browns. This

will excite the public admiration. No public can withstand magnanimity.

Next, they will take you to the scaffold, with great éclat, at the head

of an imposing procession composed of clergymen, officials, citizens

generally, and young ladies walking pensively two and two, and bearing

bouquets and immortelles. You will mount the scaffold, and while the

great concourse stand uncovered in your presence, you will read your

sappy little speech which the minister has written for you. And then, in

the midst of a grand and impressive silence, they will swing you into

per--Paradise, my son. There will not be a dry eye on the ground. You

will be a hero! Not a rough there but will envy you. Not a rough there

but will resolve to emulate you. And next, a great procession will

follow you to the tomb--will weep over your remains--the young ladies

will sing again the hymns made dear by sweet associations connected with

the jail, and, as a last tribute of affection, respect, and appreciation

of your many sterling qualities, they will walk two and two around your

bier, and strew wreaths of flowers on it. And lo! you are canonized.

Think of it, son-ingrate, assassin, robber of the dead, drunken brawler

among thieves and harlots in the slums of Boston one month, and the pet

of the pure and innocent daughters of the land the next! A bloody and

hateful devil--a bewept, bewailed, and sainted martyr--all in a month!

Fool!--so noble a fortune, and yet you sit here grieving!”

“No, madam,” I said, “you do me wrong, you do, indeed. I am perfectly

satisfied. I did not know before that my great-grandfather was hanged,

but it is of no consequence. He has probably ceased to bother about it

by this time--and I have not commenced yet. I confess, madam, that I do

something in the way of editing and lecturing, but the other crimes you

mention have escaped my memory. Yet I must have committed them--you

would not deceive a stranger. But let the past be as it was, and let the

future be as it may--these are nothing. I have only cared for one thing.

I have always felt that I should be hanged some day, and somehow the

thought has annoyed me considerably; but if you can only assure me that I

shall be hanged in New Hampshire--”

“Not a shadow of a doubt!”

“Bless you, my benefactress!--excuse this embrace--you have removed a

great load from my breast. To be hanged in New Hampshire is happiness

--it leaves an honored name behind a man, and introduces him at once into

the best New Hampshire society in the other world.”

I then took leave of the fortune-teller. But, seriously, is it well to

glorify a murderous villain on the scaffold, as Pike was glorified in New

Hampshire? Is it well to turn the penalty for a bloody crime into a

reward? Is it just to do it? Is it safe?

A NEW CRIME

LEGISLATION NEEDED

This country, during the last thirty or forty years, has produced some of

the most remarkable cases of insanity of which there is any mention in

history. For instance, there was the Baldwin case, in Ohio, twenty-two

years ago. Baldwin, from his boyhood up, had been of a vindictive,

malignant, quarrelsome nature. He put a boy's eye out once, and never

was heard upon any occasion to utter a regret for it. He did many such

things. But at last he did something that was serious. He called at a

house just after dark one evening, knocked, and when the occupant came to

the door, shot him dead, and then tried to escape, but was captured.

Two days before, he had wantonly insulted a helpless cripple, and the man

he afterward took swift vengeance upon with an assassin bullet had

knocked him down. Such was the Baldwin case. The trial was long and

exciting; the community was fearfully wrought up. Men said this

spiteful, bad-hearted villain had caused grief enough in his time, and

now he should satisfy the law. But they were mistaken; Baldwin was

insane when he did the deed--they had not thought of that. By the

argument of counsel it was shown that at half past ten in the morning on

the day of the murder, Baldwin became insane, and remained so for eleven

hours and a half exactly. This just covered the case comfortably, and he

was acquitted. Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had been

listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor crazy creature

would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of

madness. Baldwin went clear, and although his relatives and friends were

naturally incensed against the community for their injurious suspicions

and remarks, they said let it go for this time, and did not prosecute.

The Baldwins were very wealthy. This same Baldwin had momentary fits of

insanity twice afterward, and on both occasions killed people he had

grudges against. And on both these occasions the circumstances of the

killing were so aggravated, and the murders so seemingly heartless and

treacherous, that if Baldwin had not been insane he would have been

hanged without the shadow of a doubt. As it was, it required all his

political and family influence to get him clear in one of the cases, and

cost him not less than ten thousand dollars to get clear in the other.

One of these men he had notoriously been threatening to kill for twelve

years. The poor creature happened, by the merest piece of ill fortune,

to come along a dark alley at the very moment that Baldwin's insanity

came upon him, and so he was shot in the back with a gun loaded with

slugs.

Take the case of Lynch Hackett, of Pennsylvania. Twice, in public, he

attacked a German butcher by the name of Bemis Feldner, with a cane, and

both times Feldner whipped him with his fists. Hackett was a vain,

wealthy, violent gentleman, who held his blood and family in high esteem,

and believed that a reverent respect was due to his great riches. He

brooded over the shame of his chastisement for two weeks, and then, in a

momentary fit of insanity, armed himself to the teeth, rode into town,

waited a couple of hours until he saw Feldner coming down the street with

his wife on his arm, and then, as the couple passed the doorway in which

he had partially concealed himself, he drove a knife into Feldner's neck,

killing him instantly. The widow caught the limp form and eased it to

the earth. Both were drenched with blood. Hackett jocosely remarked to

her that as a professional butcher's recent wife she could appreciate the

artistic neatness of the job that left her in condition to marry again,

in case she wanted to. This remark, and another which he made to a

friend, that his position in society made the killing of an obscure

citizen simply an “eccentricity” instead of a crime, were shown to be

evidences of insanity, and so Hackett escaped punishment. The jury were

hardly inclined to accept these as proofs at first, inasmuch as the

prisoner had never been insane before the murder, and under the

tranquilizing effect of the butchering had immediately regained his right

mind; but when the defense came to show that a third cousin of Hackett's

wife's stepfather was insane, and not only insane, but had a nose the

very counterpart of Hackett's, it was plain that insanity was hereditary

in the family, and Hackett had come by it by legitimate inheritance.

Of course the jury then acquitted him. But it was a merciful providence

that Mrs. H.'s people had been afflicted as shown, else Hackett would

certainly have been hanged.

However, it is not possible to recount all the marvelous cases of

insanity that have come under the public notice in the last thirty or

forty years. There was the Durgin case in New Jersey three years ago.

The servant girl, Bridget Durgin, at dead of night, invaded her

mistress's bedroom and carved the lady literally to pieces with a knife.

Then she dragged the body to the middle of the floor, and beat and banged

it with chairs and such things. Next she opened the feather beds, and

strewed the contents around, saturated everything with kerosene, and set

fire to the general wreck. She now took up the young child of the

murdered woman in her blood smeared hands and walked off, through the

snow, with no shoes on, to a neighbor's house a quarter of a mile off,

and told a string of wild, incoherent stories about some men coming and

setting fire to the house; and then she cried piteously, and without

seeming to think there was anything suggestive about the blood upon her

hands, her clothing, and the baby, volunteered the remark that she was

afraid those men had murdered her mistress! Afterward, by her own

confession and other testimony, it was proved that the mistress had

always been kind to the girl, consequently there was no revenge in the

murder; and it was also shown that the girl took nothing away from the

burning house, not even her own shoes, and consequently robbery was not

the motive.

Now, the reader says, “Here comes that same old plea of insanity again.”

But the reader has deceived himself this time. No such plea was offered

in her defense. The judge sentenced her, nobody persecuted the governor

with petitions for her pardon, and she was promptly hanged.

There was that youth in Pennsylvania, whose curious confession was

published some years ago. It was simply a conglomeration of incoherent

drivel from beginning to end, and so was his lengthy speech on the

scaffold afterward. For a whole year he was haunted with a desire to

disfigure a certain young woman, so that no one would marry her. He did

not love her himself, and did not want to marry her, but he did not want

anybody else to do it. He would not go anywhere with her, and yet was

opposed to anybody else's escorting her. Upon one occasion he declined

to go to a wedding with her, and when she got other company, lay in wait

for the couple by the road, intending to make them go back or kill the

escort. After spending sleepless nights over his ruling desire for a

full year, he at last attempted its execution--that is, attempted to

disfigure the young woman. It was a success. It was permanent. In

trying to shoot her cheek (as she sat at the supper-table with her

parents and brothers and sisters) in such a manner as to mar its

comeliness, one of his bullets wandered a little out of the course, and

she dropped dead. To the very last moment of his life he bewailed the

ill luck that made her move her face just at the critical moment. And so

he died, apparently about half persuaded that somehow it was chiefly her

own fault that she got killed. This idiot was hanged. The plea of

insanity was not offered.

Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world, and crime is dying

out. There are no longer any murders--none worth mentioning, at any

rate. Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were

insane--but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a man, it is

evidence that you are a lunatic. In these days, too, if a person of good

family and high social standing steals anything, they call it

kleptomania, and send him to the lunatic asylum. If a person of high

standing squanders his fortune in dissipation, and closes his career with

strychnine or a bullet, “Temporary Aberration” is what was the trouble

with him.

Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common

that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal

case that comes before the courts? And is it not so cheap, and so

common, and often so trivial, that the reader smiles in derision when the

newspaper mentions it? And is it not curious to note how very often it wins

acquittal for the prisoner? Of late years it does not seem possible for a man

to so conduct himself, before killing another man, as not to be manifestly

insane. If he talks about the stars, he is insane. If he appears

nervous and uneasy an hour before the killing, he is insane. If he weeps

over a great grief, his friends shake their heads, and fear that he is

“not right.” If, an hour after the murder, he seems ill at ease,

preoccupied, and excited, he is, unquestionably insane.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against

insanity. There is where the true evil lies.

A CURIOUS DREAM [Written about 1870.]

CONTAINING A MORAL

Night before last I had a singular dream. I seemed to be sitting on a

doorstep (in no particular city perhaps) ruminating, and the time of

night appeared to be about twelve or one o'clock. The weather was balmy

and delicious. There was no human sound in the air, not even a footstep.

There was no sound of any kind to emphasize the dead stillness, except

the occasional hollow barking of a dog in the distance and the fainter

answer of a further dog. Presently up the street I heard a bony

clack-clacking, and guessed it was the castanets of a serenading party.

In a minute more a tall skeleton, hooded, and half clad in a tattered and

moldy shroud, whose shreds were flapping about the ribby latticework of

its person, swung by me with a stately stride and disappeared in the gray

gloom of the starlight. It had a broken and worm-eaten coffin on its

shoulder and a bundle of something in its hand. I knew what the

clack-clacking was then; it was this party's joints working together,

and his elbows knocking against his sides as he walked. I may say I was

surprised. Before I could collect my thoughts and enter upon any

speculations as to what this apparition might portend, I heard another

one coming for I recognized his clack-clack. He had two-thirds of a

coffin on his shoulder, and some foot and head boards under his arm.

I mightily wanted to peer under his hood and speak to him, but when he

turned and smiled upon me with his cavernous sockets and his projecting

grin as he went by, I thought I would not detain him. He was hardly gone

when I heard the clacking again, and another one issued from the shadowy

half-light. This one was bending under a heavy gravestone, and dragging

a shabby coffin after him by a string. When he got to me he gave me a

steady look for a moment or two, and then rounded to and backed up to me,

saying:

“Ease this down for a fellow, will you?”

I eased the gravestone down till it rested on the ground, and in doing so

noticed that it bore the name of “John Baxter Copmanhurst,” with “May,

1839,” as the date of his death. Deceased sat wearily down by me, and

wiped his os frontis with his major maxillary--chiefly from former habit

I judged, for I could not see that he brought away any perspiration.

“It is too bad, too bad,” said he, drawing the remnant of the shroud

about him and leaning his jaw pensively on his hand. Then he put his

left foot up on his knee and fell to scratching his anklebone absently

with a rusty nail which he got out of his coffin.

“What is too bad, friend?”

“Oh, everything, everything. I almost wish I never had died.”

“You surprise me. Why do you say this? Has anything gone wrong? What

is the matter?”

“Matter! Look at this shroud-rags. Look at this gravestone, all

battered up. Look at that disgraceful old coffin. All a man's property

going to ruin and destruction before his eyes, and ask him if anything is

wrong? Fire and brimstone!”

“Calm yourself, calm yourself,” I said. “It is too bad--it is certainly

too bad, but then I had not supposed that you would much mind such

matters, situated as you are.”

“Well, my dear sir, I DO mind them. My pride is hurt, and my comfort is

impaired--destroyed, I might say. I will state my case--I will put it to

you in such a way that you can comprehend it, if you will let me,” said

the poor skeleton, tilting the hood of his shroud back, as if he were

clearing for action, and thus unconsciously giving himself a jaunty and

festive air very much at variance with the grave character of his

position in life--so to speak--and in prominent contrast with his

distressful mood.

“Proceed,” said I.

“I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here,

in this street--there, now, I just expected that cartilage would let go!

--third rib from the bottom, friend, hitch the end of it to my spine with

a string, if you have got such a thing about you, though a bit of silver

wire is a deal pleasanter, and more durable and becoming, if one keeps it

polished--to think of shredding out and going to pieces in this way, just

on account of the indifference and neglect of one's posterity!”--and the

poor ghost grated his teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a shiver

--for the effect is mightily increased by the absence of muffling flesh

and cuticle. “I reside in that old graveyard, and have for these thirty

years; and I tell you things are changed since I first laid this old

tired frame there, and turned over, and stretched out for a long sleep,

with a delicious sense upon me of being DONE with bother, and grief,

and anxiety, and doubt, and fear, forever and ever, and listening with

comfortable and increasing satisfaction to the sexton's work, from the

startling clatter of his first spadeful on my coffin till it dulled away

to the faint patting that shaped the roof of my new home--delicious! My!

I wish you could try it to-night!” and out of my reverie deceased fetched

me a rattling slap with a bony hand.

“Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there, and was happy. For it

was out in the country then--out in the breezy, flowery, grand old woods,

and the lazy winds gossiped with the leaves, and the squirrels capered

over us and around us, and the creeping things visited us, and the birds

filled the tranquil solitude with music. Ah, it was worth ten years of a

man's life to be dead then! Everything was pleasant. I was in a good

neighborhood, for all the dead people that lived near me belonged to the

best families in the city. Our posterity appeared to think the world of

us. They kept our graves in the very best condition; the fences were

always in faultless repair, head-boards were kept painted or whitewashed,

and were replaced with new ones as soon as they began to look rusty or

decayed; monuments were kept upright, railings intact and bright, the

rose-bushes and shrubbery trimmed, trained, and free from blemish, the

walks clean and smooth and graveled. But that day is gone by. Our

descendants have forgotten us. My grandson lives in a stately house

built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep in a

neglected grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them

nests withal! I and friends that lie with me founded and secured the

prosperity of this fine city, and the stately bantling of our loves

leaves us to rot in a dilapidated cemetery which neighbors curse and

strangers scoff at. See the difference between the old time and this

--for instance: Our graves are all caved in now; our head-boards have

rotted away and tumbled down; our railings reel this way and that, with

one foot in the air, after a fashion of unseemly levity; our monuments

lean wearily, and our gravestones bow their heads discouraged; there be

no adornments any more--no roses, nor shrubs, nor graveled walks, nor

anything that is a comfort to the eye; and even the paintless old board

fence that did make a show of holding us sacred from companionship with

beasts and the defilement of heedless feet, has tottered till it

overhangs the street, and only advertises the presence of our dismal

resting-place and invites yet more derision to it. And now we cannot

hide our poverty and tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has

stretched its withering arms abroad and taken us in, and all that remains

of the cheer of our old home is the cluster of lugubrious forest trees

that stand, bored and weary of a city life, with their feet in our

coffins, looking into the hazy distance and wishing they were there.

I tell you it is disgraceful!

“You begin to comprehend--you begin to see how it is. While our

descendants are living sumptuously on our money, right around us in the

city, we have to fight hard to keep skull and bones together. Bless you,

there isn't a grave in our cemetery that doesn't leak--not one. Every

time it rains in the night we have to climb out and roost in the trees---

and sometimes we are wakened suddenly by the chilly water trickling down

the back of our necks. Then I tell you there is a general heaving up of

old graves and kicking over of old monuments, and scampering of old

skeletons for the trees! Bless me, if you had gone along there some such

nights after twelve you might have seen as many as fifteen of us roosting

on one limb, with our joints rattling drearily and the wind wheezing

through our ribs! Many a time we have perched there for three or four

dreary hours, and then come down, stiff and chilled through and drowsy,

and borrowed each other's skulls to bail out our graves with--if you will

glance up in my mouth now as I tilt my head back, you can see that my

head-piece is half full of old dry sediment--how top-heavy and stupid it

makes me sometimes! Yes, sir, many a time if you had happened to come

along just before the dawn you'd have caught us bailing out the graves

and hanging our shrouds on the fence to dry. Why, I had an elegant

shroud stolen from there one morning--think a party by the name of Smith

took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder--I think so

because the first time I ever saw him he hadn't anything on but a check

shirt, and the last time I saw him, which was at a social gathering in

the new cemetery, he was the best-dressed corpse in the company--and it

is a significant fact that he left when he saw me; and presently an old

woman from here missed her coffin--she generally took it with her when

she went anywhere, because she was liable to take cold and bring on the

spasmodic rheumatism that originally killed her if she exposed herself to

the night air much. She was named Hotchkiss--Anna Matilda Hotchkiss--you

might know her? She has two upper front teeth, is tall, but a good deal

inclined to stoop, one rib on the left side gone, has one shred of rusty

hair hanging from the left side of her head, and one little tuft just

above and a little forward of her right ear, has her underjaw wired on

one side where it had worked loose, small bone of left forearm gone--lost

in a fight--has a kind of swagger in her gait and a 'gallus' way of going

with her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the air--has been pretty free

and easy, and is all damaged and battered up till she looks like a

queensware crate in ruins--maybe you have met her?”

“God forbid!” I involuntarily ejaculated, for somehow I was not looking

for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard. But I

hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, “I simply meant I had

not had the honor--for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a

friend of yours. You were saying that you were robbed--and it was a

shame, too--but it appears by what is left of the shroud you have on that

it was a costly one in its day. How did--”

A most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features and

shriveled integuments of my guest's face, and I was beginning to grow

uneasy and distressed, when he told me he was only working up a deep,

sly smile, with a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired

his present garment a ghost in a neighboring cemetery missed one. This

reassured me, but I begged him to confine himself to speech thenceforth,

because his facial expression was uncertain. Even with the most

elaborate care it was liable to miss fire. Smiling should especially be

avoided. What HE might honestly consider a shining success was likely to

strike me in a very different light. I said I liked to see a skeleton

cheerful, even decorously playful, but I did not think smiling was a

skeleton's best hold.

“Yes, friend,” said the poor skeleton, “the facts are just as I have

given them to you. Two of these old graveyards---the one that I resided

in and one further along--- have been deliberately neglected by our

descendants of to-day until there is no occupying them any longer. Aside

from the osteological discomfort of it---and that is no light matter this

rainy weather---the present state of things is ruinous to property. We

have got to move or be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly

destroyed.

“Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there

isn't a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance---now that

is an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box

mounted on an express-wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned,

silver-mounted burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black

plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots

---I mean folks like the Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such.

They are all about ruined. The most substantial people in our set, they

were. And now look at them--utterly used up and poverty-stricken. One

of the Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late barkeeper for some

fresh shavings to put under his head. I tell you it speaks volumes, for

there is nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument. He

loves to read the inscription. He comes after a while to believe what it

says himself, and then you may see him sitting on the fence night after

night enjoying it. Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world

of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was

alive. I wish they were used more. Now I don't complain, but

confidentially I DO think it was a little shabby in my descendants to

give me nothing but this old slab of a gravestone---and all the more that

there isn't a compliment on it. It used to have

'GONE TO HIS JUST REWARD'

on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by and by I noticed that

whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the

railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that,

and then he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and

comfortable. So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools. But a

dead man always takes a deal of pride in his monument. Yonder goes half

a dozen of the Jarvises now, with the family monument along. And

Smithers and some hired specters went by with his awhile ago. Hello,

Higgins, good-by, old friend! That's Meredith Higgins--died in '44

--belongs to our set in the cemetery--fine old family--great-grandmother

was an Injun--I am on the most familiar terms with him--he didn't hear me

was the reason he didn't answer me. And I am sorry, too, because I would

have liked to introduce you. You would admire him. He is the most

disjointed, sway-backed, and generally distorted old skeleton you ever

saw, but he is full of fun. When he laughs it sounds like rasping two

stones together, and he always starts it off with a cheery screech like

raking a nail across a window-pane. Hey, Jones! That is old Columbus

Jones--shroud cost four hundred dollars--entire trousseau, including

monument, twenty-seven hundred. This was in the spring of '26. It was

enormous style for those days. Dead people came all the way from the

Alleghanies to see his things--the party that occupied the grave next to

mine remembers it well. Now do you see that individual going along with

a piece of a head-board under his arm, one leg-bone below his knee gone,

and not a thing in the world on? That is Barstow Dalhousie, and next to

Columbus Jones he was the most sumptuously outfitted person that ever

entered our cemetery. We are all leaving. We cannot tolerate the

treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendants. They open

new cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy. They mend the

streets, but they never mend anything that is about us or belongs to us.

Look at that coffin of mine--yet I tell you in its day it was a piece of

furniture that would have attracted attention in any drawing-room in this

city. You may have it if you want it--I can't afford to repair it.

Put a new bottom in her, and part of a new top, and a bit of fresh lining

along the left side, and you'll find her about as comfortable as any

receptacle of her species you ever tried. No thanks--no, don't mention it--

you have been civil to me, and I would give you all the property I have

got before I would seem ungrateful. Now this winding-sheet is a kind of

a sweet thing in its way, if you would like to--No? Well, just as you

say, but I wished to be fair and liberal--there's nothing mean about ME.

Good-by, friend, I must be going. I may have a good way to go to-night

--don't know. I only know one thing for certain, and that is that I am

on the emigrant trail now, and I'll never sleep in that crazy old

cemetery again. I will travel till I find respectable quarters, if I

have to hoof it to New Jersey. All the boys are going. It was decided

in public conclave, last night, to emigrate, and by the time the sun

rises there won't be a bone left in our old habitations. Such cemeteries

may suit my surviving friends, but they do not suit the remains that have

the honor to make these remarks. My opinion is the general opinion.

If you doubt it, go and see how the departing ghosts upset things before

they started. They were almost riotous in their demonstrations of

distaste. Hello, here are some of the Bledsoes, and if you will give me

a lift with this tombstone I guess I will join company and jog along with

them--mighty respectable old family, the Bledsoes, and used to always

come out in six-horse hearses and all that sort of thing fifty years ago

when I walked these streets in daylight. Good-by, friend.”

And with his gravestone on his shoulder he joined the grisly procession,

dragging his damaged coffin after him, for notwithstanding he pressed it

upon me so earnestly, I utterly refused his hospitality. I suppose that

for as much as two hours these sad outcasts went clacking by, laden with

their dismal effects, and all that time I sat pitying them. One or two

of the youngest and least dilapidated among them inquired about midnight

trains on the railways, but the rest seemed unacquainted with that mode

of travel, and merely asked about common public roads to various towns

and cities, some of which are not on the map now, and vanished from it

and from the earth as much as thirty years ago, and some few of them

never HAD existed anywhere but on maps, and private ones in real-estate

agencies at that. And they asked about the condition of the cemeteries

in these towns and cities, and about the reputation the citizens bore as

to reverence for the dead.

This whole matter interested me deeply, and likewise compelled my

sympathy for these homeless ones. And it all seeming real, and I not

knowing it was a dream, I mentioned to one shrouded wanderer an idea that

had entered my head to publish an account of this curious and very

sorrowful exodus, but said also that I could not describe it truthfully,

and just as it occurred, without seeming to trifle with a grave subject

and exhibit an irreverence for the dead that would shock and distress

their surviving friends. But this bland and stately remnant of a former

citizen leaned him far over my gate and whispered in my ear, and said:

“Do not let that disturb you. The community that can stand such

graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can

say about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them.”

At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and

left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with

my head out of the bed and “sagging” downward considerably--a position

favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.

NOTE.--The reader is assured that if the cemeteries in his town are kept

in good order, this Dream is not leveled at his town at all, but is

leveled particularly and venomously at the NEXT town.

A TRUE STORY

REPEATED WORD FOR WORD AS I HEARD IT--[Written about 1876]

It was summer-time, and twilight. We were sitting on the porch of the

farmhouse, on the summit of the hill, and “Aunt Rachel” was sitting

respectfully below our level, on the steps--for she was our Servant, and

colored. She was of mighty frame and stature; she was sixty years old,

but her eye was undimmed and her strength unabated. She was a cheerful,

hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to laugh than it is for a

bird to sing. She was under fire now, as usual when the day was done.

That is to say, she was being chaffed without mercy, and was enjoying it.

She would let off peal after peal of laughter, and then sit with her face in

her hands and shake with throes of enjoyment which she could no longer

get breath enough to express. At such a moment as this a thought

occurred to me, and I said:

“Aunt Rachel, how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any

trouble?”

She stopped quaking. She paused, and there was moment of silence. She

turned her face over her shoulder toward me, and said, without even a

smile in her voice:

“Misto C-----, is you in 'arnest?”

It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner and my speech, too.

I said:

“Why, I thought--that is, I meant--why, you can't have had any trouble.

I've never heard you sigh, and never seen your eye when there wasn't a

laugh in it.”

She faced fairly around now, and was full earnestness.

“Has I had any trouble? Misto C-----, I's gwyne to tell you, den I leave

it to you. I was bawn down 'mongst de slaves; I knows all 'bout slavery,

'case I ben one of 'em my own se'f. Well sah, my ole man--dat's my

husban'--he was lovin' an' kind to me, jist as kind as you is to yo' own

wife. An' we had chil'en--seven chil'en--an' we loved dem chil'en jist de

same as you loves yo' chil'en. Dey was black, but de Lord can't make

chil'en so black but what dey mother loves 'em an' wouldn't give 'em up,

no, not for anything dat's in dis whole world.

“Well, sah, I was raised in ole Fo'ginny, but my mother she was raised in

Maryland; an' my SOULS! she was turrible when she'd git started! My LAN!

but she'd make de fur fly! When she'd git into dem tantrums, she always

had one word dat she said. She'd straighten herse'f up an' put her fists

in her hips an' say, 'I want you to understan' dat I wa'n't bawn in the

mash to be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chickens, I is!'

'Ca'se you see, dat's what folks dat's bawn in Maryland calls deyselves,

an' dey's proud of it. Well, dat was her word. I don't ever forgit it,

beca'se she said it so much, an' beca'se she said it one day when my

little Henry tore his wris' awful, and most busted 'is head, right up at

de top of his forehead, an' de niggers didn't fly aroun' fas' enough to

'tend to him. An' when dey talk' back at her, she up an' she says,

'Look-a-heah!' she says, 'I want you niggers to understan' dat I wa'n't

bawn in de mash be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's chickens,

I is!' an' den she clar' dat kitchen an' bandage' up de chile herse'f.

So I says dat word, too, when I's riled.

“Well, bymeby my ole mistis say she's broke, an' she got to sell all de

niggers on de place. An' when I heah dat dey gwyne to sell us all off at

oction in Richmon', oh, de good gracious! I know what dat mean!”

Aunt Rachel had gradually risen, while she warmed to her subject, and now

she towered above us, black against the stars.

“Dey put chains on us an' put us on a stan' as high as dis po'ch--twenty

foot high--an' all de people stood aroun', crowds an' crowds. An' dey'd

come up dah an' look at us all roun', an' squeeze our arm, an' make us

git up an' walk, an' den say, Dis one too ole,' or 'Dis one lame,' or

'Dis one don't 'mount to much.' An' dey sole my ole man, an' took him

away, an' dey begin to sell my chil'en an' take dem away, an' I begin to

cry; an' de man say, 'Shet up yo' damn blubberin',' an' hit me on de mouf

wid his han'. An' when de las' one was gone but my little Henry, I grab'

HIM clost up to my breas' so, an' I ris up an' says, 'You sha'nt take him

away,' I says; 'I'll kill de man dat tetches him!' I says. But my little

Henry whisper an' say 'I gwyne to run away, an' den I work an' buy yo'

freedom' Oh, bless de chile, he always so good! But dey got him--dey got

him, de men did; but I took and tear de clo'es mos' off of 'em an' beat

'em over de head wid my chain; an' DEY give it to ME too, but I didn't

mine dat.

“Well, dah was my ole man gone, an' all my chil'en, all my seven chil'en

--an' six of 'em I hain't set eyes on ag'in to dis day, an' dat's

twenty-two year ago las' Easter. De man dat bought me b'long' in

Newbern, an' he took me dah. Well, bymeby de years roll on an' de waw

come. My marster he was a Confedrit colonel, an' I was his family's

cook. So when de Unions took dat town, dey all run away an' lef' me all

by myse'f wid de other niggers in dat mons'us big house. So de big Union

officers move in dah, an' dey ask me would I cook for DeM. 'Lord bless

you,' says I, 'dat what I's FOR.'

“Dey wa'n't no small-fry officers, mine you, dey was de biggest dey IS;

an' de way dey made dem sojers mosey roun'! De Gen'l he tole me to boss

dat kitchen; an' he say, 'If anybody come meddlin' wid you, you jist make

'em walk chalk; don't you be afeared,' he say; 'you's 'mong frens now.'

“Well, I thinks to myse'f, if my little Henry ever got a chance to run

away, he'd make to de Norf, o' course. So one day I comes in dah whar de

big officers was, in de parlor, an' I drops a kurtchy, so, an' I up an'

tole 'em 'bout my Henry, dey a-listenin' to my troubles jist de same as

if I was white folks; an' I says, 'What I come for is beca'se if he got

away and got up Norf whar you gemmen comes from, you might 'a' seen him,

maybe, an' could tell me so as I could fine him ag'in; he was very

little, an' he had a sk-yar on his lef' wris' an' at de top of his

forehead.' Den dey look mournful, an' de Gen'l says, 'How long sence you

los' him?' an' I say, 'Thirteen year.' Den de Gen'l say, 'He wouldn't be

little no mo' now--he's a man!'

“I never thought o' dat befo'! He was only dat little feller to ME yit.

I never thought 'bout him growin' up an' bein' big. But I see it den.

None o' de gemmen had run acrost him, so dey couldn't do nothin' for me.

But all dat time, do' I didn't know it, my Henry WAS run off to de Norf,

years an' years, an' he was a barber, too, an' worked for hisse'f. An'

bymeby, when de waw come he ups an' he says: 'I's done barberin',' he

says, 'I's gwyne to fine my ole mammy, less'n she's dead.' So he sole

out an' went to whar dey was recruitin', an' hired hisse'f out to de

colonel for his servant; an' den he went all froo de battles everywhah,

huntin' for his ole mammy; yes, indeedy, he'd hire to fust one officer

an' den another, tell he'd ransacked de whole Souf; but you see I didn't

know NUFFIN 'bout dis. How was I gwyne to know it?

“Well, one night we had a big sojer ball; de sojers dah at Newbern was

always havin' balls an' carryin' on. Dey had 'em in my kitchen, heaps o'

times, 'ca'se it was so big. Mine you, I was DOWN on sich doin's;

beca'se my place was wid de officers, an' it rasp me to have dem common

sojers cavortin' roun' in my kitchen like dat. But I alway' stood aroun'

an kep' things straight, I did; an' sometimes dey'd git my dander up, an'

den I'd make 'em clar dat kitchen, mine I TELL you!

“Well, one night--it was a Friday night--dey comes a whole platoon f'm a

NIGGER ridgment da was on guard at de house--de house was head quarters,

you know-an' den I was jist A-BILIN'! Mad? I was jist A-BOOMIN'! I

swelled aroun', an swelled aroun'; I jist was a-itchin' for 'em to do

somefin for to start me. AN' dey was a-waltzin' an a dancin'! MY! but dey

was havin' a time! an I jist a-swellin' an' a-swellin' up! Pooty soon,'long

comes sich a spruce young nigger a-sailin' down de room wid a

yaller wench roun' de wais'; an' roun an' roun' an roun' dey went, enough

to make a body drunk to look at 'em; an' when dey got abreas' o' me, dey

went to kin' o' balancin' aroun' fust on one leg an' den on t'other, an'

smilin' at my big red turban, an' makin' fun, an' I ups an' says 'GIT

along wid you!--rubbage!' De young man's face kin' o' changed, all of a

sudden, for 'bout a second, but den he went to smilin' ag'in, same as he

was befo'. Well, 'bout dis time, in comes some niggers dat played music

and b'long' to de ban', an' dey NEVER could git along widout puttin' on

airs. 'An de very fust air dey put on dat night, I lit into em! Dey

laughed, an' dat made me wuss. De res' o' de niggers got to laughin',

an' den my soul alive but I was hot! My eye was jist a-blazin'! I jist

straightened myself up so--jist as I is now, plum to de ceilin', mos'

--an' I digs my fists into my hips, an' I says, 'Look-a-heah!' I says, 'I

want you niggers to understan' dat I wa'n't bawn in de mash to be fool'

by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue hen's Chickens, I is!'--an' den I see

dat young man stan' a-starin' an' stiff, lookin' kin' o' up at de ceilin'

like he fo'got somefin, an' couldn't 'member it no mo'. Well, I jist

march' on dem niggers--so, lookin' like a gen'l--an' dey jist cave' away

befo' me an' out at de do'. An' as dis young man a-goin' out, I heah him

say to another nigger, 'Jim,' he says, 'you go 'long an' tell de cap'n I

be on han' 'bout eight o'clock in de mawnin'; dey's somefin on my mine,'

he says; 'I don't sleep no mo' dis night. You go 'long,' he says, 'an'

leave me by my own se'f.'

“Dis was 'bout one o'clock in de mawnin'. Well, 'bout seven, I was up

an' on han', gittin' de officers' breakfast. I was a-stoopin' down by de

stove---jist so, same as if yo' foot was de stove--an' I'd opened de stove

do' wid my right han'--so, pushin' it back, jist as I pushes yo' foot

--an' I'd jist got de pan o' hot biscuits in my han' an' was 'bout to

raise up, when I see a black face come aroun' under mine, an' de eyes

a-lookin' up into mine, jist as I's a-lookin' up clost under yo' face

now; an' I jist stopped RIGHT dah, an' never budged! jist gazed an' gazed

so; an' de pan begin to tremble, an' all of a sudden I knowed! De pan

drop' on de flo' an' I grab his lef' han' an' shove back his sleeve--jist

so, as I's doin' to you--an' den I goes for his forehead an' push de hair

back so, an' 'Boy!' I says, 'if you an't my Henry, what is you doin' wid

dis welt on yo' wris' an' dat sk-yar on yo' forehead? De Lord God ob

heaven be praise', I got my own ag'in!'

“Oh no' Misto C-----, I hain't had no trouble. An' no JOY!”

THE SIAMESE TWINS--[Written about 1868.]

I do not wish to write of the personal habits of these strange creatures

solely, but also of certain curious details of various kinds concerning

them, which, belonging only to their private life, have never crept into

print. Knowing the Twins intimately, I feel that I am peculiarly well

qualified for the task I have taken upon myself.

The Siamese Twins are naturally tender and affectionate in disposition,

and have clung to each other with singular fidelity throughout a long and

eventful life. Even as children they were inseparable companions; and it

was noticed that they always seemed to prefer each other's society to

that of any other persons. They nearly always played together; and, so

accustomed was their mother to this peculiarity, that, whenever both of

them chanced to be lost, she usually only hunted for one of them

--satisfied that when she found that one she would find his brother

somewhere in the immediate neighborhood. And yet these creatures were

ignorant and unlettered--barbarians themselves and the offspring of

barbarians, who knew not the light of philosophy and science. What a

withering rebuke is this to our boasted civilization, with its

quarrelings, its wranglings, and its separations of brothers!

As men, the Twins have not always lived in perfect accord; but still

there has always been a bond between them which made them unwilling to go

away from each other and dwell apart. They have even occupied the same

house, as a general thing, and it is believed that they have never failed

to even sleep together on any night since they were born. How surely do

the habits of a lifetime become second nature to us! The Twins always go

to bed at the same time; but Chang usually gets up about an hour before

his brother. By an understanding between themselves, Chang does all the

indoor work and Eng runs all the errands. This is because Eng likes to

go out; Chang's habits are sedentary. However, Chang always goes along.

Eng is a Baptist, but Chang is a Roman Catholic; still, to please his

brother, Chang consented to be baptized at the same time that Eng was, on

condition that it should not “count.” During the war they were strong

partisans, and both fought gallantly all through the great struggle--Eng

on the Union side and Chang on the Confederate. They took each other

prisoners at Seven Oaks, but the proofs of capture were so evenly

balanced in favor of each, that a general army court had to be assembled

to determine which one was properly the captor and which the captive.

The jury was unable to agree for a long time; but the vexed question was

finally decided by agreeing to consider them both prisoners, and then

exchanging them. At one time Chang was convicted of disobedience of

orders, and sentenced to ten days in the guard-house, but Eng, in spite

of all arguments, felt obliged to share his imprisonment, notwithstanding

he himself was entirely innocent; and so, to save the blameless brother

from suffering, they had to discharge both from custody--the just reward

of faithfulness.

Upon one occasion the brothers fell out about something, and Chang

knocked Eng down, and then tripped and fell on him, whereupon both

clinched and began to beat and gouge each other without mercy. The

bystanders interfered, and tried to separate them, but they could not do

it, and so allowed them to fight it out. In the end both were disabled,

and were carried to the hospital on one and the same shutter.

Their ancient habit of going always together had its drawbacks when they

reached man's estate, and entered upon the luxury of courting. Both fell

in love with the same girl. Each tried to steal clandestine interviews

with her, but at the critical moment the other would always turn up.

By and by Eng saw, with distraction, that Chang had won the girl's

affections; and, from that day forth, he had to bear with the agony of

being a witness to all their dainty billing and cooing. But with a

magnanimity that did him infinite credit, he succumbed to his fate, and

gave countenance and encouragement to a state of things that bade fair to

sunder his generous heart-strings. He sat from seven every evening until

two in the morning, listening to the fond foolishness of the two lovers,

and to the concussion of hundreds of squandered kisses--for the privilege

of sharing only one of which he would have given his right hand. But he

sat patiently, and waited, and gaped, and yawned, and stretched, and

longed for two o'clock to come. And he took long walks with the lovers

on moonlight evenings--sometimes traversing ten miles, notwithstanding he

was usually suffering from rheumatism. He is an inveterate smoker; but

he could not smoke on these occasions, because the young lady was

painfully sensitive to the smell of tobacco. Eng cordially wanted them

married, and done with it; but although Chang often asked the momentous

question, the young lady could not gather sufficient courage to answer it

while Eng was by. However, on one occasion, after having walked some

sixteen miles, and sat up till nearly daylight, Eng dropped asleep, from

sheer exhaustion, and then the question was asked and answered. The

lovers were married. All acquainted with the circumstance applauded the

noble brother-in-law. His unwavering faithfulness was the theme of every

tongue. He had stayed by them all through their long and arduous

courtship; and when at last they were married, he lifted his hands above

their heads, and said with impressive unction, “Bless ye, my children, I

will never desert ye!” and he kept his word. Fidelity like this is all

too rare in this cold world.

By and by Eng fell in love with his sister-in-law's sister, and married

her, and since that day they have all lived together, night and day, in

an exceeding sociability which is touching and beautiful to behold, and

is a scathing rebuke to our boasted civilization.

The sympathy existing between these two brothers is so close and so

refined that the feelings, the impulses, the emotions of the one are

instantly experienced by the other. When one is sick, the other is sick;

when one feels pain, the other feels it; when one is angered, the other's

temper takes fire. We have already seen with what happy facility they

both fell in love with the same girl. Now Chang is bitterly opposed to

all forms of intemperance, on principle; but Eng is the reverse--for,

while these men's feelings and emotions are so closely wedded, their

reasoning faculties are unfettered; their thoughts are free. Chang

belongs to the Good Templars, and is a hard-working, enthusiastic

supporter of all temperance reforms. But, to his bitter distress, every

now and then Eng gets drunk, and, of course, that makes Chang drunk too.

This unfortunate thing has been a great sorrow to Chang, for it almost

destroys his usefulness in his favorite field of effort. As sure as he

is to head a great temperance procession Eng ranges up alongside of him,

prompt to the minute, and drunk as a lord; but yet no more dismally and

hopelessly drunk than his brother, who has not tasted a drop. And so the

two begin to hoot and yell, and throw mud and bricks at the Good

Templars; and, of course, they break up the procession. It would be

manifestly wrong to punish Chang for what Eng does, and, therefore, the

Good Templars accept the untoward situation, and suffer in silence and

sorrow. They have officially and deliberately examined into the matter,

and find Chang blameless. They have taken the two brothers and filled

Chang full of warm water and sugar and Eng full of whisky, and in

twenty-five minutes it was not possible to tell which was the drunkest.

Both were as drunk as loons--and on hot whisky punches, by the smell of

their breath. Yet all the while Chang's moral principles were unsullied,

his conscience clear; and so all just men were forced to confess that he

was not morally, but only physically, drunk. By every right and by every

moral evidence the man was strictly sober; and, therefore, it caused his

friends all the more anguish to see him shake hands with the pump and try

to wind his watch with his night-key.

There is a moral in these solemn warnings--or, at least, a warning in

these solemn morals; one or the other. No matter, it is somehow. Let us

heed it; let us profit by it.

I could say more of an instructive nature about these interesting beings,

but let what I have written suffice.

Having forgotten to mention it sooner, I will remark in conclusion that

the ages of the Siamese Twins are respectively fifty-one and fifty-three

years.

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

At the anniversary festival of the Scottish Corporation of London on

Monday evening, in response to the toast of “The Ladies,” MARK TWAIN

replied. The following is his speech as reported in the London Observer:

I am proud, indeed, of the distinction of being chosen to respond to this

especial toast, to 'The Ladies,' or to women if you please, for that is

the preferable term, perhaps; it is certainly the older, and therefore

the more entitled to reverence [Laughter.] I have noticed that the

Bible, with that plain, blunt honesty which is such a conspicuous

characteristic of the Scriptures, is always particular to never refer to

even the illustrious mother of all mankind herself as a 'lady,' but

speaks of her as a woman. [Laughter.] It is odd, but you will find it is

so. I am peculiarly proud of this honor, because I think that the toast

to women is one which, by right and by every rule of gallantry, should

take precedence of all others--of the army, of the navy, of even royalty

itself--perhaps, though the latter is not necessary in this day and in

this land, for the reason that, tacitly, you do drink a broad general

health to all good women when you drink the health of the Queen of

England and the Princess of Wales. [Loud cheers.] I have in mind a poem

just now which is familiar to you all, familiar to everybody. And what

an inspiration that was (and how instantly the present toast recalls the

verses to all our minds) when the most noble, the most gracious, the

purest, and sweetest of all poets says:

“Woman! O woman!--er--

Wom--”

[Laughter.] However, you remember the lines; and you remember how

feelingly, how daintily, how almost imperceptibly the verses raise up

before you, feature by feature, the ideal of a true and perfect woman;

and how, as you contemplate the finished marvel, your homage grows into

worship of the intellect that could create so fair a thing out of mere

breath, mere words. And you call to mind now, as I speak, how the poet,

with stern fidelity to the history of all humanity, delivers this

beautiful child of his heart and his brain over to the trials and sorrows

that must come to all, sooner or later, that abide in the earth, and how

the pathetic story culminates in that apostrophe--so wild, so regretful,

so full of mournful retrospection. The lines run thus:

“Alas!--alas!--a--alas!

----Alas!--------alas!”

--and so on. [Laughter.] I do not remember the rest; but, taken

together, it seems to me that poem is the noblest tribute to woman that

human genius has ever brought forth--[laughter]--and I feel that if I

were to talk hours I could not do my great theme completer or more

graceful justice than I have now done in simply quoting that poet's

matchless words. [Renewed laughter.] The phases of the womanly nature

are infinite in their variety. Take any type of woman, and you shall

find in it something to respect, something to admire, something to love.

And you shall find the whole joining you heart and hand. Who was more

patriotic than Joan of Arc? Who was braver? Who has given us a grander

instance of self-sacrificing devotion? Ah! you remember, you remember

well, what a throb of pain, what a great tidal wave of grief swept over

us all when Joan of Arc fell at Waterloo. [Much laughter.] Who does not

sorrow for the loss of Sappho, the sweet singer of Israel? [Laughter.]

Who among us does not miss the gentle ministrations, the softening

influences, the humble piety of Lucretia Borgia? [Laughter.] Who can

join in the heartless libel that says woman is extravagant in dress when

he can look back and call to mind our simple and lowly mother Eve arrayed

in her modification of the Highland costume. [Roars of laughter.]

Sir, women have been soldiers, women have been painters, women have been

poets. As long as language lives the name of Cleopatra will live.

And, not because she conquered George III--[laughter]--but because she

wrote those divine lines:--

“Let dogs delight to bark and bite,

For God hath made them so.”

[More laughter.] The story of the world is adorned with the names of

illustrious ones of our own sex--some of them sons of St. Andrew, too

--Scott, Bruce, Burns, the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis--[laughter]--the

gifted Ben Lomond, and the great new Scotchman, Ben Disraeli. [Great

laughter.][1.] 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.]

1.[Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, at that time Prime Minister of England, had

just been elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University, and had made a

speech which gave rise to a world of discussion.]

A GHOST STORY

I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper

stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came. The place had

long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence.

I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead,

that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my

life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of

the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my face and

clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.

I was glad enough when I reached my room and locked out the mold and the

darkness. A cheery fire was burning in the grate, and I sat down before

it with a comforting sense of relief. For two hours I sat there,

thinking of bygone times; recalling old scenes, and summoning

half-forgotten faces out of the mists of the past; listening, in fancy,

to voices that long ago grew silent for all time, and to once familiar

songs that nobody sings now. And as my reverie softened down to a sadder

and sadder pathos, the shrieking of the winds outside softened to a wail,

the angry beating of the rain against the panes diminished to a tranquil

patter, and one by one the noises in the street subsided, until the

hurrying footsteps of the last belated straggler died away in the

distance and left no sound behind.

The fire had burned low. A sense of loneliness crept over me. I arose

and undressed, moving on tiptoe about the room, doing stealthily what I

had to do, as if I were environed by sleeping enemies whose slumbers it

would be fatal to break. I covered up in bed, and lay listening to the

rain and wind and the faint creaking of distant shutters, till they

lulled me to sleep.

I slept profoundly, but how long I do not know. All at once I found

myself awake, and filled with a shuddering expectancy. All was still.

All but my own heart--I could hear it beat. Presently the bedclothes

began to slip away slowly toward the foot of the bed, as if some one were

pulling them! I could not stir; I could not speak. Still the blankets

slipped deliberately away, till my breast was uncovered. Then with a

great effort I seized them and drew them over my head. I waited,

listened, waited. Once more that steady pull began, and once more I lay

torpid a century of dragging seconds till my breast was naked again. At

last I roused my energies and snatched the covers back to their place and

held them with a strong grip. I waited. By and by I felt a faint tug,

and took a fresh grip. The tug strengthened to a steady strain--it grew

stronger and stronger. My hold parted, and for the third time the

blankets slid away. I groaned. An answering groan came from the foot of

the bed! Beaded drops of sweat stood upon my forehead. I was more dead

than alive. Presently I heard a heavy footstep in my room--the step of

an elephant, it seemed to me--it was not like anything human. But it was

moving from me--there was relief in that. I heard it approach the door

--pass out without moving bolt or lock--and wander away among the dismal

corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it

passed--and then silence reigned once more.

When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself, “This is a dream--simply

a hideous dream.” And so I lay thinking it over until I convinced myself

that it was a dream, and then a comforting laugh relaxed my lips and I

was happy again. I got up and struck a light; and when I found that the

locks and bolts were just as I had left them, another soothing laugh

welled in my heart and rippled from my lips. I took my pipe and lit it,

and was just sitting down before the fire, when--down went the pipe out of

my nerveless fingers, the blood forsook my cheeks, and my placid

breathing was cut short with a gasp! In the ashes on the hearth, side by

side with my own bare footprint, was another, so vast that in comparison

mine was but an infant's! Then I had had a visitor, and the elephant

tread was explained.

I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear. I lay a long

time, peering into the darkness, and listening. Then I heard a grating

noise overhead, like the dragging of a heavy body across the floor; then

the throwing down of the body, and the shaking of my windows in response

to the concussion. In distant parts of the building I heard the muffled

slamming of doors. I heard, at intervals, stealthy footsteps creeping in

and out among the corridors, and up and down the stairs. Sometimes these

noises approached my door, hesitated, and went away again. I heard the

clanking of chains faintly, in remote passages, and listened while the

clanking grew nearer--while it wearily climbed the stairways, marking

each move by the loose surplus of chain that fell with an accented rattle

upon each succeeding step as the goblin that bore it advanced. I heard

muttered sentences; half-uttered screams that seemed smothered violently;

and the swish of invisible garments, the rush of invisible wings. Then I

became conscious that my chamber was invaded--that I was not alone.

I heard sighs and breathings about my bed, and mysterious whisperings.

Three little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceiling

directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment, and then dropped

--two of them upon my face and one upon the pillow. They spattered,

liquidly, and felt warm. Intuition told me they had turned to gouts of

blood as they fell--I needed no light to satisfy myself of that. Then I

saw pallid faces, dimly luminous, and white uplifted hands, floating

bodiless in the air--floating a moment and then disappearing.

The whispering ceased, and the voices and the sounds, and a solemn

stillness followed. I waited and listened. I felt that I must have

light or die. I was weak with fear. I slowly raised myself toward a

sitting posture, and my face came in contact with a clammy hand!

All strength went from me apparently, and I fell back like a stricken

invalid. Then I heard the rustle of a garment--it seemed to pass to the

door and go out.

When everything was still once more, I crept out of bed, sick and feeble,

and lit the gas with a hand that trembled as if it were aged with a

hundred years. The light brought some little cheer to my spirits. I sat

down and fell into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the

ashes. By and by its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up

and the broad gas-flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I

heard that elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and

nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned.

The tread reached my very door and paused--the light had dwindled to a

sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The

door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and

presently was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me. I watched

it with fascinated eyes. A pale glow stole over the Thing; gradually its

cloudy folds took shape--an arm appeared, then legs, then a body, and

last a great sad face looked out of the vapor. Stripped of its filmy

housings, naked, muscular and comely, the majestic Cardiff Giant loomed

above me!

All my misery vanished--for a child might know that no harm could come

with that benignant countenance. My cheerful spirits returned at once,

and in sympathy with them the gas flamed up brightly again. Never a

lonely outcast was so glad to welcome company as I was to greet the

friendly giant. I said:

“Why, is it nobody but you? Do you know, I have been scared to death for

the last two or three hours? I am most honestly glad to see you. I wish

I had a chair--Here, here, don't try to sit down in that thing--”

But it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him and down he

went--I never saw a chair shivered so in my life.

“Stop, stop, you'll ruin ev--”

Too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved

into its original elements.

“Confound it, haven't you got any judgment at all? Do you want to ruin

all the furniture on the place? Here, here, you petrified fool--”

But it was no use. Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed,

and it was a melancholy ruin.

“Now what sort of a way is that to do? First you come lumbering about

the place bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry

me to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume which

would not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people except in a

respectable theater, and not even there if the nudity were of your sex,

you repay me by wrecking all the furniture you can find to sit down on.

And why will you? You damage yourself as much as you do me. You have

broken off the end of your spinal column, and littered up the floor with

chips of your hams till the place looks like a marble yard. You ought to

be ashamed of yourself--you are big enough to know better.”

“Well, I will not break any more furniture. But what am I to do? I have

not had a chance to sit down for a century.” And the tears came into his

eyes.

“Poor devil,” I said, “I should not have been so harsh with you. And you

are an orphan, too, no doubt. But sit down on the floor here--nothing

else can stand your weight--and besides, we cannot be sociable with you

away up there above me; I want you down where I can perch on this high

counting-house stool and gossip with you face to face.” So he sat down

on the floor, and lit a pipe which I gave him, threw one of my red

blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sitz-bath on his head, helmet

fashion, and made himself picturesque and comfortable. Then he crossed

his ankles, while I renewed the fire, and exposed the flat, honeycombed

bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth.

“What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your

legs, that they are gouged up so?”

“Infernal chilblains--I caught them clear up to the back of my head,

roosting out there under Newell's farm. But I love the place; I love it

as one loves his old home. There is no peace for me like the peace I

feel when I am there.”

We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked

tired, and spoke of it.

“Tired?” he said. “Well, I should think so. And now I will tell you all

about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the

Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the museum. I am the

ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have

given that poor body burial again. Now what was the most natural thing

for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it!--

haunt the place where the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after

night. I even got other spirits to help me. But it did no good, for

nobody ever came to the museum at midnight. Then it occurred to me to

come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever

got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that

perdition could furnish. Night after night we have shivered around

through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering,

tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost

worn out. But when I saw a light in your room to-night I roused my

energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am

tired out--entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some

hope!”

I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:

“This transcends everything! everything that ever did occur! Why you

poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing

--you have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself--the real Cardiff

Giant is in Albany!--[A fact. The original fraud was ingeniously and

fraudfully duplicated, and exhibited in New York as the “only genuine”

Cardiff Giant (to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real

colossus) at the very same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a

museum in Albany,]--Confound it, don't you know your own remains?”

I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation,

overspread a countenance before.

The Petrified Man rose slowly to his feet, and said:

“Honestly, is that true?”

“As true as I am sitting here.”

He took the pipe from his mouth and laid it on the mantel, then stood

irresolute a moment (unconsciously, from old habit, thrusting his hands

where his pantaloons pockets should have been, and meditatively dropping

his chin on his breast), and finally said:

“Well-I never felt so absurd before. The Petrified Man has sold

everybody else, and now the mean fraud has ended by selling its own

ghost! My son, if there is any charity left in your heart for a poor

friendless phantom like me, don't let this get out. Think how you would

feel if you had made such an ass of yourself.”

I heard his stately tramp die away, step by step down the stairs and out

into the deserted street, and felt sorry that he was gone, poor fellow

--and sorrier still that he had carried off my red blanket and my

bath-tub.

THE CAPITOLINE VENUS

CHAPTER I

[Scene-An Artist's Studio in Rome.]

“Oh, George, I do love you!”

“Bless your dear heart, Mary, I know that--why is your father so

obdurate?”

“George, he means well, but art is folly to him--he only understands

groceries. He thinks you would starve me.”

“Confound his wisdom--it savors of inspiration. Why am I not a

money-making bowelless grocer, instead of a divinely gifted sculptor

with nothing to eat?”

“Do not despond, Georgy, dear--all his prejudices will fade away as soon

as you shall have acquired fifty thousand dol--”

“Fifty thousand demons! Child, I am in arrears for my board!”