Produced by David Widger
SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
by Mark Twain
Part 4.
THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN--[Written about 1870.]
["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just
as well."--B. F.]
This party was one of those persons whom they call Philosophers. He was
twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of
Boston. These houses remain unto this day, and have signs upon them
worded in accordance with the facts. The signs are considered well
enough to have, though not necessary, because the inhabitants point out
the two birthplaces to the stranger anyhow, and sometimes as often as
several times in the same day. The subject of this memoir was of a
vicious disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention
of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising
generation of all subsequent ages. His simplest acts, also, were
contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys
forever--boys who might otherwise have been happy. It was in this spirit
that he became the son of a soap-boiler, and probably for no other reason
than that the efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything might
be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers.
With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work
all day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the
light of a smoldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that
also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them. Not satisfied
with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and
water, and studying astronomy at meal-time--a thing which has brought
affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's
pernicious biography.
His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot
follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those
everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin, on the spot. If he buys
two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, "Remember what Franklin has
said, my son--'A grout a day's a penny a year"'; and the comfort is all
gone out of those peanuts. If he wants to spin his top when he has done
work, his father quotes, "Procrastination is the thief of time." If he
does a virtuous action, he never gets anything for it, because "Virtue is
its own reward." And that boy is hounded to death and robbed of his
natural rest, because Franklin, said once, in one of his inspired flights
of malignity:
Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on
such terms. The sorrow that that maxim has cost me, through my parents,
experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell. The legitimate result is
my present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration.
My parents used to have me up before nine o'clock in the morning
sometimes when I was a boy. If they had let me take my natural rest
where would I have been now? Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by
all.
And what an adroit old adventurer the subject of this memoir was!
In order to get a chance to fly his kite on Sunday he used to hang a key
on the string and let on to be fishing for lightning. And a guileless
public would go home chirping about the "wisdom" and the "genius" of the
hoary Sabbath-breaker. If anybody caught him playing "mumblepeg" by
himself, after the age of sixty, he would immediately appear to be
ciphering out how the grass grew--as if it was any of his business.
My grandfather knew him well, and he says Franklin was always
fixed--always ready. If a body, during his old age, happened on him
unexpectedly when he was catching flies, or making mud-pies, or sliding
on a cellar door, he would immediately look wise, and rip out a maxim,
and walk off with his nose in the air and his cap turned wrong side
before, trying to appear absent-minded and eccentric. He was a hard lot.
He invented a stove that would smoke your head off in four hours by the
clock. One can see the almost devilish satisfaction he took in it by his
giving it his name.
He was always proud of telling how he entered Philadelphia for the first
time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four
rolls of bread under his arm. But really, when you come to examine it
critically, it was nothing. Anybody could have done it.
To the subject of this memoir belongs the honor of recommending the army
to go back to bows and arrows in place of bayonets and muskets.
He observed, with his customary force, that the bayonet was very well
under some circumstances, but that he doubted whether it could be used
with accuracy at a long range.
Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country,
and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such
a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up.
No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his,
which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that
had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel;
and also to snub his stove, and his military inspirations, his unseemly
endeavor to make himself conspicuous when he entered Philadelphia, and
his flying his kite and fooling away his time in all sorts of such ways
when he ought to have been foraging for soap-fat, or constructing
candles. I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent
calamitous idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great
genius by working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in
the night instead of waiting till morning like a Christian; and that this
program, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father's fool.
It is time these gentlemen were finding out that these execrable
eccentricities of instinct and conduct are only the evidences of genius,
not the creators of it. I wish I had been the father of my parents long
enough to make them comprehend this truth, and thus prepare them to let
their son have an easier time of it. When I was a child I had to boil
soap, notwithstanding my father was wealthy, and I had to get up early
and study geometry at breakfast, and peddle my own poetry, and do
everything just as Franklin did, in the solemn hope that I would be a
Franklin some day. And here I am.
MR. BLOKE'S ITEM--[Written about 1865.]
Our esteemed friend, Mr. John William Bloke, of Virginia City, walked
into the office where we are sub-editor at a late hour last night, with
an expression of profound and heartfelt suffering upon his countenance,
and, sighing heavily, laid the following item reverently upon the desk,
and walked slowly out again. He paused a moment at the door, and seemed
struggling to command his feelings sufficiently to enable him to speak,
and then, nodding his head toward his manuscript, ejaculated in a broken
voice, "Friend of mine--oh! how sad!" and burst into tears. We were so
moved at his distress that we did not think to call him back and endeavor
to comfort him until he was gone, and it was too late. The paper had
already gone to press, but knowing that our friend would consider the
publication of this item important, and cherishing the hope that to print
it would afford a melancholy satisfaction to his sorrowing heart, we
stopped, the press at once and inserted it in our columns:
DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.--Last evening, about six o'clock, as Mr.
William Schuyler, an old and respectable citizen of South Park, was
leaving his residence to go down-town, as has been his usual custom
for many years with the exception only of a short interval in the
spring of 1850, during which he was confined to his bed by injuries
received in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly
placing himself directly in its wake and throwing up his hands and
shouting, which if he had done so even a single moment sooner, must
inevitably have frightened the animal still more instead of checking
its speed, although disastrous enough to himself as it was, and
rendered more melancholy and distressing by reason of the presence
of his wife's mother, who was there and saw the sad occurrence
notwithstanding it is at least likely, though not necessarily so,
that she should be reconnoitering in another direction when
incidents occur, not being vivacious and on the lookout, as a
general thing, but even the reverse, as her own mother is said to
have stated, who is no more, but died in the full hope of a glorious
resurrection, upwards of three years ago; aged eighty-six, being a
Christian woman and without guile, as it were, or property, in
consequence of the fire of 1849, which destroyed every single thing
she had in the world. But such is life. Let us all take warning by
this solemn occurrence, and let us endeavor so to conduct ourselves
that when we come to die we can do it. Let us place our hands upon
our heart, and say with earnestness and sincerity that from this day
forth we will beware of the intoxicating bowl.--'First Edition of
the Californian.'
The head editor has been in here raising the mischief, and tearing his
hair and kicking the furniture about, and abusing me like a pickpocket.
He says that every time he leaves me in charge of the paper for half an
hour I get imposed upon by the first infant or the first idiot that comes
along. And he says that that distressing item of Mr. Bloke's is nothing
but a lot of distressing bash, and has no point to it, and no sense in
it, and no information in it, and that there was no sort of necessity for
stopping the press to publish it.
Now all this comes of being good-hearted. If I had been as
unaccommodating and unsympathetic as some people, I would have told
Mr. Bloke that I wouldn't receive his communication at such a late hour;
but no, his snuffling distress touched my heart, and I jumped at the
chance of doing something to modify his misery. I never read his item to
see whether there was anything wrong about it, but hastily wrote the few
lines which preceded it, and sent it to the printers. And what has my
kindness done for me? It has done nothing but bring down upon me a storm
of abuse and ornamental blasphemy.
Now I will read that item myself, and see if there is any foundation for
all this fuss. And if there is, the author of it shall hear from me.
I have read it, and I am bound to admit that it seems a little mixed at a
first glance. However, I will peruse it once more.
I have read it again, and it does really seem a good deal more mixed than
ever.
I have read it over five times, but if I can get at the meaning of it I
wish I may get my just deserts. It won't bear analysis. There are
things about it which I cannot understand at all. It don't say whatever
became of William Schuyler. It just says enough about him to get one
interested in his career, and then drops him. Who is William Schuyler,
anyhow, and what part of South Park did he live in, and if he started
down-town at six o'clock, did he ever get there, and if he did, did
anything happen to him? Is he the individual that met with the
"distressing accident"? Considering the elaborate circumstantiality of
detail observable in the item, it seems to me that it ought to contain
more information than it does. On the contrary, it is obscure and not
only obscure, but utterly incomprehensible. Was the breaking of Mr.
Schuyler's leg, fifteen years ago, the "distressing accident" that
plunged Mr. Bloke into unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up here
at dead of night and stop our press to acquaint the world with the
circumstance? Or did the "distressing accident" consist in the
destruction of Schuyler's mother-in-law's property in early times?
Or did it consist in the death of that person herself three years ago
(albeit it does not appear that she died by accident)? In a word, what
did that "distressing accident" consist in? What did that driveling ass
of a Schuyler stand in the wake of a runaway horse for, with his shouting
and gesticulating, if he wanted to stop him? And how the mischief could
he get run over by a horse that had already passed beyond him? And what
are we to take "warning" by? And how is this extraordinary chapter of
incomprehensibilities going to be a "lesson" to us? And, above all, what
has the intoxicating "bowl" got to do with it, anyhow? It is not stated
that Schuyler drank, or that his wife drank, or that his mother-in-law
drank, or that the horse drank wherefore, then, the reference to the
intoxicating bowl? It does seem to me that if Mr. Bloke had let the
intoxicating bowl alone himself, he never would have got into so much
trouble about this exasperating imaginary accident. I have read this.
absurd item over and over again, with all its insinuating plausibility,
until my head swims; but I can make neither head nor tail of it. There
certainly seems to have been an accident of some kind or other, but it is
impossible to determine what the nature of it was, or who was the
sufferer by it. I do not like to do it, but I feel compelled to request
that the next time anything happens to one of Mr. Bloke's friends, he
will append such explanatory notes to his account of it as will enable me
to find out what sort of an accident it was and whom it happened to. I
had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the
verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another such
production as the above.
A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE
CHAPTER I
THE SECRET REVEALED.
It was night. Stillness reigned in the grand old feudal castle of
Klugenstein. The year 1222 was drawing to a close. Far away up in the
tallest of the castle's towers a single light glimmered. A secret
council was being held there. The stern old lord of Klugenstein sat in
a chair of state meditating. Presently he, said, with a tender
accent:
"My daughter!"
A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,
answered:
"Speak, father!"
"My daughter, the time is come for the revealing of the mystery that hath
puzzled all your young life. Know, then, that it had its birth in the
matters which I shall now unfold. My brother Ulrich is the great Duke of
Brandenburgh. Our father, on his deathbed, decreed that if no son were
born to Ulrich, the succession should pass to my house, provided a son
were born to me. And further, in case no son, were born to either, but
only daughters, then the succession should pass to Ulrich's daughter,
if she proved stainless; if she did not, my daughter should succeed,
if she retained a blameless name. And so I, and my old wife here, prayed
fervently for the good boon of a son, but the prayer was vain. You were
born to us. I was in despair. I saw the mighty prize slipping from my
grasp, the splendid dream vanishing away. And I had been so hopeful!
Five years had Ulrich lived in wedlock, and yet his wife had borne no
heir of either sex.
"'But hold,' I said, 'all is not lost.' A saving scheme had shot athwart
my brain. You were born at midnight. Only the leech, the nurse, and six
waiting-women knew your sex. I hanged them every one before an hour had
sped. Next morning all the barony went mad with rejoicing over the
proclamation that a son was born to Klugenstein, an heir to mighty
Brandenburgh! And well the secret has been kept. Your mother's own
sister nursed your infancy, and from that time forward we feared nothing.
"When you were ten years old, a daughter was born to Ulrich. We grieved,
but hoped for good results from measles, or physicians, or other natural
enemies of infancy, but were always disappointed. She lived, she throve
--Heaven's malison upon her! But it is nothing. We are safe. For,
Ha-ha! have we not a son? And is not our son the future Duke? Our
well-beloved Conrad, is it not so?--for, woman of eight-and-twenty years
--as you are, my child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!
"Now it hath come to pass that age hath laid its hand upon my brother,
and he waxes feeble. The cares of state do tax him sore. Therefore he
wills that you shall come to him and be already Duke--in act, though not
yet in name. Your servitors are ready--you journey forth to-night.
"Now listen well. Remember every word I say. There is a law as old as
Germany that if any woman sit for a single instant in the great ducal
chair before she hath been absolutely crowned in presence of the people,
SHE SHALL DIE! So heed my words. Pretend humility. Pronounce your
judgments from the Premier's chair, which stands at the foot of the
throne. Do this until you are crowned and safe. It is not likely that
your sex will ever be discovered; but still it is the part of wisdom to
make all things as safe as may be in this treacherous earthly life."
"Oh; my father, is it for this my life hath been a lie! Was it that I
might cheat my unoffending cousin of her rights? Spare me, father,
spare your child!"
"What, huzzy! Is this my reward for the august fortune my brain has
wrought for thee? By the bones of my father, this puling sentiment of
thine but ill accords with my humor.
"Betake thee to the Duke, instantly! And beware how thou meddlest with my
purpose!"
Let this suffice, of the conversation. It is enough for us to know that
the prayers, the entreaties and the tears of the gentle-natured girl
availed nothing. They nor anything could move the stout old lord of
Klugenstein. And so, at last, with a heavy heart, the daughter saw the
castle gates close behind her, and found herself riding away in the
darkness surrounded by a knightly array of armed, vassals and a brave
following of servants.
The old baron sat silent for many minutes after his daughter's departure,
and then he turned to his sad wife and said:
"Dame, our matters seem speeding fairly. It is full three months since I
sent the shrewd and handsome Count Detzin on his devilish mission to my
brother's daughter Constance. If he fail, we are not wholly safe; but if
he do succeed, no power can bar our girl from being Duchess e'en though
ill-fortune should decree she never should be Duke!"
"My heart is full of bodings, yet all may still be well."
"Tush, woman! Leave the owls to croak. To bed with ye, and dream of
Brandenburgh and grandeur!"