off his boots and crept up-stairs and arrived at the room of those
elderly ladies without having wakened any sleepers. He undressed in the
dark and got into bed and snuggled up against somebody. He was a little
surprised, but not much--for he thought it was our brother Ben. It was
winter, and the bed was comfortable, and the supposed Ben added to the
comfort--and so he was dropping off to sleep very well satisfied with
his progress so far and full of happy dreams of what was going to happen
in the morning. But something else was going to happen sooner than that,
and it happened now. The maid that was being crowded fumed and fretted
and struggled and presently came to a half-waking condition and
protested against the crowding. That voice paralyzed Orion. He couldn't
move a limb; he couldn't get his breath; and the crowded one discovered
his new whiskers and began to scream. This removed the paralysis, and
Orion was out of bed and clawing round in the dark for his clothes in a
fraction of a second. Both maids began to scream then, so Orion did not
wait to get his whole wardrobe. He started with such parts of it as he
could grab. He flew to the head of the stairs and started down, and was
paralyzed again at that point, because he saw the faint yellow flame of
a candle soaring up the stairs from below and he judged that Dr. G. was
behind it, and he was. He had no clothes on to speak of, but no matter,
he was well enough fixed for an occasion like this, because he had a
butcher-knife in his hand. Orion shouted to him, and this saved his
life, for the Doctor recognized his voice. Then in those deep-sea-going
bass tones of his that I used to admire so much when I was a little boy,
he explained to Orion the change that had been made, told him where to
find the Clemens family, and closed with some quite unnecessary advice
about posting himself before he undertook another adventure like
that--advice which Orion probably never needed again as long as he
lived.
One bitter December night, Orion sat up reading until three o'clock in
the morning and then, without looking at a clock, sallied forth to call
on a young lady. He hammered and hammered at the door; couldn't get any
response; didn't understand it. Anybody else would have regarded that as
an indication of some kind or other and would have drawn inferences and
gone home. But Orion didn't draw inferences, he merely hammered and
hammered, and finally the father of the girl appeared at the door in a
dressing-gown. He had a candle in his hand and the dressing-gown was all
the clothing he had on--except an expression of unwelcome which was so
thick and so large that it extended all down his front to his instep and
nearly obliterated the dressing-gown. But Orion didn't notice that this
was an unpleasant expression. He merely walked in. The old gentleman
took him into the parlor, set the candle on a table, and stood. Orion
made the usual remarks about the weather, and sat down--sat down and
talked and talked and went on talking--that old man looking at him
vindictively and waiting for his chance--waiting treacherously and
malignantly for his chance. Orion had not asked for the young lady. It
was not customary. It was understood that a young fellow came to see the
girl of the house, not the founder of it. At last Orion got up and made
some remark to the effect that probably the young lady was busy and he
would go now and call again. That was the old man's chance, and he said
with fervency "Why good land, aren't you going to stop to breakfast?"
Orion did not come to Hannibal until two or three years after my
father's death. Meantime he remained in St Louis. He was a journeyman
printer and earning wages. Out of his wage he supported my mother and my
brother Henry, who was two years younger than I. My sister Pamela helped
in this support by taking piano pupils. Thus we got along, but it was
pretty hard sledding. I was not one of the burdens, because I was taken
from school at once, upon my father's death, and placed in the office of
the Hannibal "Courier," as printer's apprentice, and Mr. S., the editor
and proprietor of the paper, allowed me the usual emolument of the
office of apprentice--that is to say board and clothes, but no money.
The clothes consisted of two suits a year, but one of the suits always
failed to materialize and the other suit was not purchased so long as
Mr. S.'s old clothes held out. I was only about half as big as Mr. S.,
consequently his shirts gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a
circus tent, and I had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them
short enough.
There were two other apprentices. One was Steve Wilkins, seventeen or
eighteen years old and a giant. When he was in Mr. S.'s clothes they
fitted him as the candle-mould fits the candle--thus he was generally in
a suffocated condition, particularly in the summer-time. He was a
reckless, hilarious, admirable creature; he had no principles, and was
delightful company. At first we three apprentices had to feed in the
kitchen with the old slave cook and her very handsome and bright and
well-behaved young mulatto daughter. For his own amusement--for he was
not generally laboring for other people's amusement--Steve was
constantly and persistently and loudly and elaborately making love to
that mulatto girl and distressing the life out of her and worrying the
old mother to death. She would say, "Now, Marse Steve, Marse Steve,
can't you behave yourself?" With encouragement like that, Steve would
naturally renew his attentions and emphasize them. It was killingly
funny to Ralph and me. And, to speak truly, the old mother's distress
about it was merely a pretence. She quite well understood that by the
customs of slaveholding communities it was Steve's right to make love to
that girl if he wanted to. But the girl's distress was very real. She
had a refined nature, and she took all Steve's extravagant love-making
in resentful earnest.
We got but little variety in the way of food at that kitchen table, and
there wasn't enough of it anyway. So we apprentices used to keep alive
by arts of our own--that is to say, we crept into the cellar nearly
every night, by a private entrance which we had discovered, and we
robbed the cellar of potatoes and onions and such things, and carried
them down-town to the printing-office, where we slept on pallets on the
floor, and cooked them at the stove and had very good times.
As I have indicated, Mr. S.'s economies were of a pretty close and rigid
kind. By and by, when we apprentices were promoted from the basement to
the ground floor and allowed to sit at the family table, along with the
one journeyman, Harry H., the economies continued. Mrs. S. was a bride.
She had attained to that distinction very recently, after waiting a good
part of a lifetime for it, and she was the right woman in the right
place, according to the economics of the place, for she did not trust
the sugar-bowl to us, but sweetened our coffee herself. That is, she
went through the motions. She didn't really sweeten it. She seemed to
put one heaping teaspoonful of brown sugar into each cup, but, according
to Steve, that was a deceit. He said she dipped the spoon in the coffee
first to make the sugar stick, and then scooped the sugar out of the
bowl with the spoon upside down, so that the effect to the eye was a
heaped-up spoon, whereas the sugar on it was nothing but a layer. This
all seems perfectly true to me, and yet that thing would be so difficult
to perform that I suppose it really didn't happen, but was one of
Steve's lies.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCVIII.
FEBRUARY 1, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XI.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[Sidenote: (1850.)]
[_Dictated March 28th, 1906._] About 1849 or 1850 Orion severed his
connection with the printing-house in St. Louis and came up to Hannibal,
and bought a weekly paper called the Hannibal "Journal," together with
its plant and its good-will, for the sum of five hundred dollars cash.
He borrowed the cash at ten per cent. interest, from an old farmer named
Johnson who lived five miles out of town. Then he reduced the
subscription price of the paper from two dollars to one dollar. He
reduced the rates for advertising in about the same proportion, and
thus he created one absolute and unassailable certainty--to wit: that
the business would never pay him a single cent of profit. He took me out
of the "Courier" office and engaged my services in his own at three
dollars and a half a week, which was an extravagant wage, but Orion was
always generous, always liberal with everybody except himself. It cost
him nothing in my case, for he never was able to pay me a penny as long
as I was with him. By the end of the first year he found he must make
some economies. The office rent was cheap, but it was not cheap enough.
He could not afford to pay rent of any kind, so he moved the whole plant
into the house we lived in, and it cramped the dwelling-place cruelly.
He kept that paper alive during four years, but I have at this time no
idea how he accomplished it. Toward the end of each year he had to turn
out and scrape and scratch for the fifty dollars of interest due Mr.
Johnson, and that fifty dollars was about the only cash he ever received
or paid out, I suppose, while he was proprietor of that newspaper,
except for ink and printing-paper. The paper was a dead failure. It had
to be that from the start. Finally he handed it over to Mr. Johnson, and
went up to Muscatine, Iowa, and acquired a small interest in a weekly
newspaper there. It was not a sort of property to marry on--but no
matter. He came across a winning and pretty girl who lived in Quincy,
Illinois, a few miles below Keokuk, and they became engaged. He was
always falling in love with girls, but by some accident or other he had
never gone so far as engagement before. And now he achieved nothing but
misfortune by it, because he straightway fell in love with a Keokuk
girl. He married the Keokuk girl and they began a struggle for life
which turned out to be a difficult enterprise, and very unpromising.
To gain a living in Muscatine was plainly impossible, so Orion and his
new wife went to Keokuk to live, for she wanted to be near her
relatives. He bought a little bit of a job-printing plant--on credit, of
course--and at once put prices down to where not even the apprentices
could get a living out of it, and this sort of thing went on.
[Sidenote: (1853.)]
I had not joined the Muscatine migration. Just before that happened
(which I think was in 1853) I disappeared one night and fled to St.
Louis. There I worked in the composing-room of the "Evening News" for a
time, and then started on my travels to see the world. The world was New
York City, and there was a little World's Fair there. It had just been
opened where the great reservoir afterward was, and where the sumptuous
public library is now being built--Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
I arrived in New York with two or three dollars in pocket change and a
ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in the lining of my coat. I got work at
villainous wages in the establishment of John A. Gray and Green in Cliff
Street, and I found board in a sufficiently villainous mechanics'
boarding-house in Duane Street. The firm paid my wages in wildcat money
at its face value, and my week's wage merely sufficed to pay board and
lodging. By and by I went to Philadelphia and worked there some months
as a "sub" on the "Inquirer" and the "Public Ledger." Finally I made a
flying trip to Washington to see the sights there, and in 1854 I went
back to the Mississippi Valley, sitting upright in the smoking-car two
or three days and nights. When I reached St. Louis I was exhausted. I
went to bed on board a steamboat that was bound for Muscatine. I fell
asleep at once, with my clothes on, and didn't wake again for thirty-six
hours.
[Sidenote: (1854.)]
... I worked in that little job-office in Keokuk as much as two years, I
should say, without ever collecting a cent of wages, for Orion was never
able to pay anything--but Dick Higham and I had good times. I don't know
what Dick got, but it was probably only uncashable promises.
[Sidenote: (1856.)]
One day in the midwinter of 1856 or 1857--I think it was 1856--I was
coming along the main street of Keokuk in the middle of the forenoon. It
was bitter weather--so bitter that that street was deserted, almost. A
light dry snow was blowing here and there on the ground and on the
pavement, swirling this way and that way and making all sorts of
beautiful figures, but very chilly to look at. The wind blew a piece of
paper past me and it lodged against a wall of a house. Something about
the look of it attracted my attention and I gathered it in. It was a
fifty-dollar bill, the only one I had ever seen, and the largest
assemblage of money I had ever encountered in one spot. I advertised it
in the papers and suffered more than a thousand dollars' worth of
solicitude and fear and distress during the next few days lest the owner
should see the advertisement and come and take my fortune away. As many
as four days went by without an applicant; then I could endure this kind
of misery no longer. I felt sure that another four could not go by in
this safe and secure way. I felt that I must take that money out of
danger. So I bought a ticket for Cincinnati and went to that city. I
worked there several months in the printing-office of Wrightson and
Company. I had been reading Lieutenant Herndon's account of his
explorations of the Amazon and had been mightily attracted by what he
said of coca. I made up my mind that I would go to the head waters of
the Amazon and collect coca and trade in it and make a fortune. I left
for New Orleans in the steamer "Paul Jones" with this great idea filling
my mind. One of the pilots of that boat was Horace Bixby. Little by
little I got acquainted with him, and pretty soon I was doing a lot of
steering for him in his daylight watches. When I got to New Orleans I
inquired about ships leaving for Pará and discovered that there weren't
any, and learned that there probably wouldn't be any during that
century. It had not occurred to me to inquire about those particulars
before leaving Cincinnati, so there I was. I couldn't get to the Amazon.
I had no friends in New Orleans and no money to speak of. I went to
Horace Bixby and asked him to make a pilot out of me. He said he would
do it for a hundred dollars cash in advance. So I steered for him up to
St. Louis, borrowed the money from my brother-in-law and closed the
bargain. I had acquired this brother-in-law several years before. This
was Mr. William A. Moffett, a merchant, a Virginian--a fine man in every
way. He had married my sister Pamela, and the Samuel E. Moffett of whom
I have been speaking was their son. Within eighteen months I became a
competent pilot, and I served that office until the Mississippi River
traffic was brought to a standstill by the breaking out of the civil
war.
... Meantime Orion had gone down the river and established his little
job-printing-office in Keokuk. On account of charging next to nothing
for the work done in his job-office, he had almost nothing to do there.
He was never able to comprehend that work done on a profitless basis
deteriorates and is presently not worth anything, and that customers are
then obliged to go where they can get better work, even if they must pay
better prices for it. He had plenty of time, and he took up Blackstone
again. He also put up a sign which offered his services to the public
as a lawyer. He never got a case, in those days, nor even an applicant,
although he was quite willing to transact law business for nothing and
furnish the stationery himself. He was always liberal that way.
[Sidenote: (1861.)]
Presently he moved to a wee little hamlet called Alexandria, two or
three miles down the river, and he put up that sign there. He got no
custom. He was by this time very hard aground. But by this time I was
beginning to earn a wage of two hundred and fifty dollars a month as
pilot, and so I supported him thenceforth until 1861, when his ancient
friend, Edward Bates, then a member of Mr. Lincoln's first cabinet, got
him the place of Secretary of the new Territory of Nevada, and Orion and
I cleared for that country in the overland stage-coach, I paying the
fares, which were pretty heavy, and carrying with me what money I had
been able to save--this was eight hundred dollars, I should say--and it
was all in silver coin and a good deal of a nuisance because of its
weight. And we had another nuisance, which was an Unabridged Dictionary.
It weighed about a thousand pounds, and was a ruinous expense, because
the stage-coach Company charged for extra baggage by the ounce. We could
have kept a family for a time on what that dictionary cost in the way of
extra freight--and it wasn't a good dictionary anyway--didn't have any
modern words in it--only had obsolete ones that they used to use when
Noah Webster was a child.
The Government of the new Territory of Nevada was an interesting
menagerie. Governor Nye was an old and seasoned politician from New
York--politician, not statesman. He had white hair; he was in fine
physical condition; he had a winningly friendly face and deep lustrous
brown eyes that could talk as a native language the tongue of every
feeling, every passion, every emotion. His eyes could outtalk his
tongue, and this is saying a good deal, for he was a very remarkable
talker, both in private and on the stump. He was a shrewd man; he
generally saw through surfaces and perceived what was going on inside
without being suspected of having an eye on the matter.
When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them.
They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood
they still retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and
ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had
then moved out into the world and a broader life. There were many
practical jokers in the new Territory. I do not take pleasure in
exposing this fact, for I liked those people; but what I am saying is
true. I wish I could say a kindlier thing about them instead--that they
were burglars, or hat-rack thieves, or something like that, that
wouldn't be utterly uncomplimentary. I would prefer it, but I can't say
those things, they would not be true. These people were practical
jokers, and I will not try to disguise it. In other respects they were
plenty good-enough people; honest people; reputable and likable. They
played practical jokes upon each other with success, and got the
admiration and applause and also the envy of the rest of the community.
Naturally they were eager to try their arts on big game, and that was
what the Governor was. But they were not able to score. They made
several efforts, but the Governor defeated these efforts without any
trouble and went on smiling his pleasant smile as if nothing had
happened. Finally the joker chiefs of Carson City and Virginia City
conspired together to see if their combined talent couldn't win a
victory, for the jokers were getting into a very uncomfortable place:
the people were laughing at them, instead of at their proposed victim.
They banded themselves together to the number of ten and invited the
Governor to what was a most extraordinary attention in those
days--pickled oyster stew and champagne--luxuries very seldom seen in
that region, and existing rather as fabrics of the imagination than as
facts.
The Governor took me with him. He said disparagingly,
"It's a poor invention. It doesn't deceive. Their idea is to get me
drunk and leave me under the table, and from their standpoint this will
be very funny. But they don't know me. I am familiar with champagne and
have no prejudices against it."
The fate of the joke was not decided until two o'clock in the morning.
At that hour the Governor was serene, genial, comfortable, contented,
happy and sober, although he was so full that he couldn't laugh without
shedding champagne tears. Also, at that hour the last joker joined his
comrades under the table, drunk to the last perfection. The Governor
remarked,
"This is a dry place, Sam, let's go and get something to drink and go to
bed."
The Governor's official menagerie had been drawn from the humblest
ranks of his constituents at home--harmless good fellows who had helped
in his campaigns, and now they had their reward in petty salaries
payable in greenbacks that were worth next to nothing. Those boys had a
hard time to make both ends meet. Orion's salary was eighteen hundred
dollars a year, and he wouldn't even support his dictionary on it. But
the Irishwoman who had come out on the Governor's staff charged the
menagerie only ten dollars a week apiece for board and lodging. Orion
and I were of her boarders and lodgers; and so, on these cheap terms the
silver I had brought from home held out very well.
[Sidenote: ('62 or '63)]
At first I roamed about the country seeking silver, but at the end of
'62 or the beginning of '63 when I came up from Aurora to begin a
journalistic life on the Virginia City "Enterprise," I was presently
sent down to Carson City to report the legislative session. Orion was
soon very popular with the members of the legislature, because they
found that whereas they couldn't usually trust each other, nor anybody
else, they could trust him. He easily held the belt for honesty in that
country, but it didn't do him any good in a pecuniary way, because he
had no talent for either persuading or scaring legislators. But I was
differently situated. I was there every day in the legislature to
distribute compliment and censure with evenly balanced justice and
spread the same over half a page of the "Enterprise" every morning,
consequently I was an influence. I got the legislature to pass a wise
and very necessary law requiring every corporation doing business in the
Territory to record its charter in full, without skipping a word, in a
record to be kept by the Secretary of the Territory--my brother. All the
charters were framed in exactly the same words. For this record-service
he was authorized to charge forty cents a folio of one hundred words for
making the record; also five dollars for furnishing a certificate of
each record, and so on. Everybody had a toll-road franchise, but no
toll-road. But the franchise had to be recorded and paid for. Everybody
was a mining corporation, and had to have himself recorded and pay for
it. Very well, we prospered. The record-service paid an average of a
thousand dollars a month, in gold.
Governor Nye was often absent from the Territory. He liked to run down
to San Francisco every little while and enjoy a rest from Territorial
civilization. Nobody complained, for he was prodigiously popular, he
had been a stage-driver in his early days in New York or New England,
and had acquired the habit of remembering names and faces, and of making
himself agreeable to his passengers. As a politician this had been
valuable to him, and he kept his arts in good condition by practice. By
the time he had been Governor a year, he had shaken hands with every
human being in the Territory of Nevada, and after that he always knew
these people instantly at sight and could call them by name. The whole
population, of 20,000 persons, were his personal friends, and he could
do anything he chose to do and count upon their being contented with it.
Whenever he was absent from the Territory--which was generally--Orion
served his office in his place, as Acting Governor, a title which was
soon and easily shortened to "Governor." He recklessly built and
furnished a house at a cost of twelve thousand dollars, and there was no
other house in the sage-brush capital that could approach this property
for style and cost.
When Governor Nye's four-year term was drawing to a close, the mystery
of why he had ever consented to leave the great State of New York and
help inhabit that jack-rabbit desert was solved: he had gone out there
in order to become a United States Senator. All that was now necessary
was to turn the Territory into a State. He did it without any
difficulty. That undeveloped country and that sparse population were not
well fitted for the heavy burden of a State Government, but no matter,
the people were willing to have the change, and so the Governor's game
was made.